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Neural correlates of memory generalization in young monolingual and bilingual children

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Xiaoqiao Wang¹ (), Stephanie Castro, Maria Arredondo; ¹The University of Texas at Austin

Memory generalization enables young children to apply learned information to new contexts (Eichenbaum, 1997) and engages the brain’s prefrontal cortex (Ghetti & Fandokova, 2020). Bilingual 6- to 24-month-olds often outperform their monolingual peers on memory generalization (e.g., Brito & Barr, 2012). However, the underlying neural mechanisms and potential neural differences between young monolingual and bilingual children during this period of significant brain development remain unclear. This study will investigate children’s frontal lobe cortical activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy as they complete a deferred imitation task (Hayne et al., 1997). To date, we have collected data from 16 monolingual and 16 bilingual children (24-37 months). During the learning phase of the task, the child watched an experimenter perform eight actions on a puppet (e.g., shake hands). After a 10-minute delay, we assessed children’s performance by the number of actions they reproduced on a different puppet (i.e., generalization phase). Preliminary results from a subset sample (ten monolinguals and seven bilinguals) showed no behavioral differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. Children, especially monolinguals, showed greater right-hemisphere activation during learning (p = .021, p = .005). Monolinguals also showed significant left-frontal activation during generalization (p = .009), possibly signaling intrinsic verbal retrieval. Bilinguals did not show significant activation in either phase. These preliminary findings should be interpreted with caution given the small sample size. By the time of presentation (March 2026), we will complete the analyses of the rest. The final findings will advance our understanding of children’s cognitive development for effective learning.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Development &aging