On Friday, January 28th at 1:00 PM we are delighted to be hosting Dr. Sibylla Leon Guerrero, please contact Dr. Anderson if you would like to join us (on Zoom) to hear Dr. Leon Guerrero's talk. Dr. Guerrero's talk is titled "Functional and Structural Correlates of Language Experience in Spanish-English Bilingual Adolescents".

Functional and Structural Correlates of Language Experience in Spanish-English Bilingual Adolescents

The lifelong experience of bilingualism in adults is associated with neural adaptations that vary according to a bilingual’s age of second language acquisition, proficiency, and/or usage context. Neural activity shapes the brain’s structure over time, as seen in concomitant results in functional measures of language (e.g. Nichols & Joanisse, 2016) and cognitive (e.g., Mamiya et al., 2018) processing and structural measures of white matter fibers. However, whether and how functional and structural changes emerge before adulthood is less understood. In this talk, I will present data from joint functional and structural connectivity measures taken with adolescent Spanish-English bilinguals living in the U.S. during a naturalistic educational video paradigm. Consistent with prior findings with adults, children’s functional and structural connectivity measures were associated with their age of second language acquisition and proficiency; however, function and structure also diverged in important ways that will be discussed in the talk.

Bio: I am currently an NIH postdoctoral fellow at UC, Irvine working with Drs. Judith Kroll and Elizabeth Peña, as well as visiting fellow at Harvard University. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach across education, psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how early bilingual and bidialectal language experience shape later language and literacy development.