Why do bilinguals selectively lose access to a language after neurological insult? Research in bilingual aphasia and more recent research using neuroimaging tools has found that both age of second language acquisition (AoA) and proficiency play a role in the neural representation of two languages. The current proposal is designed to extend this seminal work in two important directions. First, the work will look at early Spanish-English bilinguals, a group of participants who have been vastly understudied in both the behavioral and neuroimaging literature. Participants will be matched on English proficiency but will be placed in two groups which have either low or high proficiency in Spanish. They will be asked to make grammaticality judgments for two-word phrases or short sentences which have subject-verb agreement, number or grammatical gender violations. These represent a test of the neural correlates associated with morphological (the plural marking 's') violations in each language. Second, the proposed project will look at the influence of cross-language overlap (i.e. functions which transfer from one language to the other easily) on the differences across groups, a factor which has not been systematically manipulated in published fMRI research to date. Our hypothesis is that language proficiency and overlap will modulate neural activity. Cross-language differences in neural activity should be larger for low proficiency subjects than for high proficiency subjects. Increased activity will be observed for functions which do not overlap. This increased activity will be larger for low proficiency subjects. Finally, a group of monolingual Spanish speakers will be tested to insure that any differences between grammatical functions are not due to a difference in difficulty. The difference in the pattern of activity across groups and languages will provide insight into the cognitive mechanisms that are necessary to process morphological information in a less proficient language. ? ? ?

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Small Research Grants (R03)
Project #
1R03HD050313-01A1
Application #
7103942
Study Section
Pediatrics Subcommittee (CHHD)
Program Officer
Mccardle, Peggy D
Project Start
2006-03-01
Project End
2008-02-28
Budget Start
2006-03-01
Budget End
2007-02-28
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2006
Total Cost
$74,250
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Houston
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
036837920
City
Houston
State
TX
Country
United States
Zip Code
77204
Rodriguez, Stephen Matthew; Archila-Suerte, Pilar; Vaughn, Kelly A et al. (2018) Anterior insular thickness predicts speech sound learning ability in bilinguals. Neuroimage 165:278-284
Hernandez, Arturo E; Woods, Elizabeth A; Bradley, Kailyn A L (2015) Neural correlates of single word reading in bilingual children and adults. Brain Lang 143:11-9
Vaughn, Kelly A; Greene, Maya R; Ramos Nuñez, Aurora I et al. (2015) The importance of neuroscience in understanding bilingual cognitive control. Cortex 73:373-4
Woods, Elizabeth A; Hernandez, Arturo E; Wagner, Victoria E et al. (2014) Expert athletes activate somatosensory and motor planning regions of the brain when passively listening to familiar sports sounds. Brain Cogn 87:122-33
Waldron, Eric J; Hernandez, Arturo E (2013) The role of age of acquisition on past tense generation in Spanish-English bilinguals: an fMRI study. Brain Lang 125:28-37
Archila-Suerte, Pilar; Zevin, Jason; Bunta, Ferenc et al. (2012) Age of acquisition and proficiency in a second language independently influence the perception of non-native speech. Biling (Camb Engl) 15:190-201
Kushalnagar, Poorna; Hannay, H Julia; Hernandez, Arturo E (2010) Bilingualism and attention: a study of balanced and unbalanced bilingual deaf users of American Sign Language and English. J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 15:263-73
Carreiras, Manuel; Carr, Lindsay; Barber, Horacio A et al. (2010) Where syntax meets math: right intraparietal sulcus activation in response to grammatical number agreement violations. Neuroimage 49:1741-9
Hernandez, Arturo E (2009) Language switching in the bilingual brain: what's next? Brain Lang 109:133-40
Hernandez, Arturo E; Hofmann, Juliane; Kotz, Sonja A (2007) Age of acquisition modulates neural activity for both regular and irregular syntactic functions. Neuroimage 36:912-23

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