Cognitive Science of Learning and Development & Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Special Seminar: The Reading Brain: Bilingual and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Child Literacy
Friday, May 3, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Hobbs 100B
Presented by Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan
Learning to read changes mind and brain. How might learning to read in multiple languages or bilingualism influence children’s emerging neural architecture for learning to read? Words have sounds and meanings. Learning to read includes the formation of sound-to-print and meaning-to-print neurocognitive pathways. Importantly, there is also significant cross-linguistic variation in how children form these associations. Children develop stronger sound-to-print networks in phonologically transparent languages such as Spanish, whereas learners of Chinese form stronger meaning-to-print associations. To understand how bilingual experiences influence children’s developing neural architecture for learning to read, we use fNIRS with Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingual children in the US. Several key findings emerge from these data. First, the findings reveal principled bilingual transfer effects of children’s word recognition at phonological, morphological, orthographic, and lexical levels of processing. Second, the findings reveal the Universal and Language-Specific aspects of literacy development across these typologically distinct languages in typical development and dyslexia. Some of our key findings stem from careful investigations of children's morphological awareness abilities in English and other languages, in typical development and dyslexia. The findings are discussed in light of theoretical perspectives on bilingualism, literacy development, and neurodevelopmental plasticity that supports learning to read across languages and learners.
About the Speaker: Dr. Ioulia Kovelman is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Kovelman focuses on child language and literacy development, especially in bilingual children. As a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Kovelman studies childhood bilingualism using various neuroimaging techniques, including functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNRS). These studies include experiments with typically developing readers and at-risk learners such as those with dyslexia and developmental language disorders (DLD). In her current research, Dr. Kovelman focuses on bilingual children learning to speak and read in typologically distinct languages: Spanish, English, and Chinese. Through this work, she addresses the universal, language-specific, and bilingual influences on child reading development and dyslexia.