Bilingual reading developments: Cross-linguistic & neuro-behavioral perspectives
Bilingual reading developments: Cross-linguistic & neuro-behavioral perspectives
The symposium’s primary objective is to explain the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on children’s literacy. Literacy is acquired differently across languages. These differences often yield cross-linguistic transfer effects in bilingual learners. How do cross-linguistic differences render bilingual learners different from monolinguals and different across their two languages? Across five distinct studies united by the bilingual lense for evaluating cross-linguistic perspectives on learning to read we used behavioral and brain imaging approaches with language groups that included Spanish, English, French, Chinese, and multilingual learners. The findings revealed bilingual neuro-cognitive transfer effects that rendered bilingual learners different from monolinguals in their oral-language literacy skills. Children who spoke more languages or more distinct languages showed the greatest differences from monolinguals. Nevertheless, investigations of poor bilingual readers revealed similar dual-language (dis)ability profiles among learners of similar as well as distinct orthographies. The findings shed new light on bilingual and cross-linguistic literacy perspectives.