The bilingual reading brain: insights from young bilingual learners

Learning to read changes children's neural organization for spoken language processing and creates new circuits that facilitate reading. How does the brain develop to support literacy in young bilinguals? To answer this question, we need to consider the formation of neural networks for word, sentence, and text-level processing in bilingual learners. Research on the development of the reading brain has predominantly focused on monolingual children, while bilingual children remain understudied in neuroimaging research. The lack of bilingualism studies often stems from assumptions of additional complexity due to socio-cultural and crosslinguistic influences. However, studying the brain bases of bilingual children contributes to our general understanding of the plasticity of neural networks; it also provides key insights that uniquely stem from examining the bilingual brain. First, bilingual language proficiency allows us to uncover how different levels of spoken and reading skills influence brain development across a broader empirical base. Second, language specificity effects in bilinguals allow same-language comparisons between monolinguals and bilinguals as well as cross-linguistic comparisons of bilinguals to other bilinguals. Third, crosslinguistic effects enable within-child investigation between the bilingual's two languages. As an added value, the by-products from these three research areas yield persuasive evidence that overrides frequent misconceptions about child bilingualism. Altogether, research on the bilingual brain advances general knowledge of neural development and provides the literacy field with a greater understanding of the assets that bilingual children bring to learning.