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Sketchpad Series

Maturation of the T-complex to lexical tone in bilingual Mandarin-English children

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

YAN YU¹ (yanhyu@gmail.com), Rigel Baron¹, Anita Hyseni¹, Victoria Billack², Angela Cheng¹, Valerie Shafer³; ¹St. John's University, New York, ²Saddle Brook Middle/High School, New Jersey, ³The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Individuals with various developmental disorders, including auditory processing disorders, frequently exhibit abnormalities in their cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) at temporal sites. Temporal CAEPs, or T-complex, have been studied in monolingual and bilingual children with non-tonal language backgrounds. However, the developmental trajectories of the T-complex in bilingual children with tonal language backgrounds, such as those with a Mandarin-English background, is mostly unknown. This study aims to investigate the neurodevelopmental changes in Mandarin lexical tone processing, as reflected by the T-complex, in Mandarin-English bilinguals. We employed a multiple oddball paradigm and recorded event-related potentials using 65 sensors from bilingual adults and children aged 5 to 10. Tone 1 (high level tone) and tone 2 (low rising tone) served as the deviant tones, while tone 3 (low dipping tone) was the standard. The analysis included data from 17 adults and 35 children, comprising 18 children aged 5-7 years and 17 children aged 8-10 years. We observed that the three sub-components of the T-complex (Na, Ta, and Tb) are less well-formed in children compared to adults, with both groups of children showing significantly larger Ta amplitudes than the adult group. The largest Ta amplitudes were seen in children aged 8 to 10. These results indicate that the T-complex involved in lexical tone processing is not fully developed in bilingual children before the age of 10.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging