“Neural Indices of Phonological Processing in Bilingual Children and in Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)”
Dr. Tanja Rinker, Professor of German as a Foreign and Second Language at Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany
Friday, March 17, 2023, 9:00–10:30 a.m. EST in 127 Moore Building and virtually via Zoom
A number of neurobiological studies have revealed how child-internal and child-external factors affect and modulate the development of a child’s phonological system (e.g., Kuhl, 2010; Yu et al., 2019). Growing up in a bilingual environment or with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are two such cases. Neural measures such as the Mismatch Negativity (MMN, Näätänen et al., 1978) or the T-complex (Wolpaw & Penry, 1975) are sensitive to L1/L2-differences as well as to impaired phonological processing and have revealed specific processing patterns (e.g., Bishop et al., 2012; Shafer et al., 2011; Wagner et al., 2013).
In this talk, Tanja Rinker will present a set of electrophysiological studies on phonological processing in Italian-German and Turkish-German bilingual children as well as in children with DLD from Germany and include a comparison to Spanish-English children from the US. Implications of the findings will be discussed.