Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural Maturation of T-complex responses to vowels in Spanish-English bilingual infants and toddlers

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

Valerie L Shafer¹ (vshafer@gc.cuny.edu), Katarina Antolovic¹, Kennedy Stomberg¹, Yan H Yu²; ¹The Graduate Center, CUNY, ²St. John's University

The aim of this study was to examine the maturation of the T-complex electrophysiological responses in infants exposed to both Spanish and English from birth. Several previous studies of bilingual four- to six-year old children have shown more negative T-complex measures for bilingual than monolingual children over the left and right temporal electrode sites (T7 and T8). These differences were attributed to bilingual children needing more exposure to their two languages before neural committment to the phonological systems of their languages. The current study hypothesized that differences in experience might occur in even younger children. In this study, the amplitudes of the T-complex elicited to the vowel in “bed” were compared between 89 monolingual (English only) and 81 bilingual infants and toddlers between three months and 46 months of age in a paradigm where infants ignored the speech sounds and watched a muted video while auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were recorded from 65 scalp electrodes. The results reveal similar latencies and amplitudes of the T-complex AEPs for the youngest age groups. The older monolingual children (28 months to 46 months), however, showed significantly greater negativity at the right site (T8) than bilingual children, with no difference at the left site (P< .05). More specifically, the monolinguals showed asymmetry, with left more positive than right sites, whereas the bilingual toddlers showed more symmetrical T-complex responses. We discuss these findings in relation to the maturation patterns observed in other language pairs.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging