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Sketchpad Series

Development of Language Selection in Bilingual Children: A Longitudinal EEG Study

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Noemi X. Diaz¹ (nxdiaz@ucdavis.edu), Tamara Y. Swaab²; ¹University of California-Davis

Efficient language selection is a fundamental challenge for bilingual speakers, particularly during childhood when cognitive control and language proficiency are still developing. This study investigates how bilingual children navigate language selection during word production and how their abilities change over time. The longitudinal study will focus on three groups of Spanish-English bilingual children in 2nd and 4th grades: (1) children with Spanish as their dominant language immersed in English at school, (2) children with English as their dominant language immersed in Spanish at school, and (3) children raised bilingually from birth. Participants will perform three picture-naming tasks designed to manipulate semantic relatedness and translation equivalence between their two languages. EEG will be recorded during these tasks to measure neural activity associated with word retrieval and language interference. Key measures include N400 amplitude, which reflects lexical-semantic competition, as well as naming latency and accuracy. Longitudinal comparisons will explore changes in language interference and efficiency over time, analyzing how second language proficiency and cognitive control development influence bilingual word production. We predict that children in all groups will show greater language interference effects, reflected in larger N400 amplitudes and slower naming latencies, in 2nd grade compared to 4th grade. However, children raised monolingual before learning a second language in school are expected to exhibit stronger interference from their dominant language than children raised bilingually, particularly in translation equivalence tasks. These findings will provide insights into how bilingual experiences shape the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying language selection during development.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic