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. 2021 Nov:243:118560.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118560. Epub 2021 Sep 7.

Cortical Thickness in bilingual and monolingual children: Relationships to language use and language skill

Kelly A Vaughn  1 , My V H Nguyen  2 , Juliana Ronderos  2 , Arturo E Hernandez  2
Affiliations

Cortical Thickness in bilingual and monolingual children: Relationships to language use and language skill

Kelly A Vaughn et al. Neuroimage. 2021 Nov.

Abstract

There is a growing body of evidence based on adult neuroimaging that suggests that the brain adapts to bilingual experiences to support language proficiency. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a useful source of data for evaluating this claim during childhood, as it involves data from a large sample of American children. Using the baseline ABCD Study data collected at ages nine and ten, the goal of this study was to identify differences in cortical thickness between bilinguals and monolinguals and to evaluate how variability in English vocabulary and English use within bilinguals might explain these group differences. We identified bilingual participants as children who spoke a non-English language and were exposed to the non-English language at home. We then identified a matched sample of English monolingual participants based on age, sex, pubertal status, parent education, household income, non-verbal IQ, and handedness. Bilinguals had thinner cortex than monolinguals in widespread cortical regions. Within bilinguals, more English use was associated with greater frontal and parietal cortical thickness; greater English vocabulary was associated with greater frontal and temporal cortical thickness. These findings replicate and extend previous research with bilingual children and highlight unexplained cortical thickness differences between bilinguals and monolinguals.

Keywords: Bilingual; Child; Cortical Thickness; MRI.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Pipeline for identifying bilingual and monolingual participants from the ABCD Release 3.0
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Significant cortical thickness differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. Fig. 2 Legend. Blue indicates thinner cortex for bilinguals than monolinguals; Red indicates thicker cortex for bilinguals than monolinguals. All results presented were significant after controlling for age, sex, pubertal status, non-verbal IQ, household income, parent education, and handedness. Figure created using the ggseg R package (Mowinckel & Vidal-Piñeiro, 2020).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Significant relationships between English use and cortical thickness within bilinguals. Fig. 3 Legend. Red indicates thicker cortex associated with more English use with family and friends when controlling for English vocabulary, age, sex, pubertal status, non-verbal IQ, household income, parent education, and handedness. Figure created using the ggseg R package (Mowinckel & Vidal-Piñeiro, 2020).
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Significant relationships between English vocabulary and cortical thickness within bilinguals. Fig. 4 Legend. Red indicates thicker cortex associated with higher English vocabulary when controlling for English use with family and friends, age, sex, pubertal status, non-verbal IQ, household income, parent education, and handedness. Figure created using the ggseg R package (Mowinckel & Vidal-Piñeiro, 2020).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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