GREAT: Localizing arithmetic in the developing bilingual brain

Project summary: Fluency in early math concepts, like simple multiplication (e.g., 2x4=8), predicts success in math through high school. Children who do not make the critical transition from calculating arithmetic problems to remembering them as math facts show lower success in school and ultimately poorer quality of life. Models of monolingual arithmetic argue that these arithmetic facts are encoded in verbal memory, making them part of the language system. In turn, bilinguals may only be able to access these facts in the language in which the facts were learned. This implies that bilingual children, who make up 20% of the school age population in the U.S., may be at a disadvantage in learning and using math facts in at least one of their languages. However, this idea is grossly inconsistent with decades of research about how bilinguals access other information from their two languages. In fact, our research using electrical brain recordings in bilingual young adults and bilingual children show similar brain responses to math facts in both languages, regardless of which language they learned the facts in. This implies that math facts are likely not stored as memory representation in only one language. However, the limitation of this type of brain data is the inability to identify the sources of the scalp-recorded brain activity. Therefore, it is still not clear if these brain signatures across languages are generated in the same or distinct areas of the bilingual brain. The goal of the current study is to develop and test a paradigm using a technology that allows us to localize brain function for arithmetic processes in the bilingual brain, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We propose an fMRI study that is a significant shift in research direction for the PI and a logical extension of the research she has been conducting in the last 10 years at UTSA. The data from this pilot study will be used to support a 5-year NIH R01 application to fully investigate the developmental trajectory of math fact learning in bilingual children. In the U.S., approximately 1 in 5 children enter school speaking a language other than English (U.S. census data). Our research will have important implications for understanding how these bilingual children store and accesses math facts to ensure high math fluency in all children.