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Neural mechanisms for syntactic ambiguity in young bilinguals

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Claire Kong-Johnson¹ (), V. Andrew Stenger^1,2, Kamil Deen¹; ¹University of Hawai'i at Manoa, ²John A. Burns School of Medicine

Understanding syntactically ambiguous sentences requires the integration of multiple cues and significant cognitive control (CC). Because of children’s developing CC systems, they often struggle interpreting ambiguous sentences. Some research suggests bilingualism can lead to adaptations in the CC brain network through managing two active languages. Yet the neural mechanisms linking bilingual experience, syntactic ambiguity resolution and CC-related brain development remain poorly understood. This study investigates how bilingualism and age shape brain networks supporting ambiguity resolution. English–Hawaiian bilinguals and English monolinguals (adults and children, 5–10 yrs), perform two auditory ambiguity tasks during fMRI scanning: (1) judging whether an action matches a garden-path sentence, and (2) selecting which of two images matches a sentence containing a prepositional phrase ambiguity. We compare ambiguous vs unambiguous conditions (tasks 1/2), and pre-critical word activation to post-critical word activation (task 1) to investigate the mechanism each group uses to resolve the sentence. Preliminary analyses indicate adult bilinguals engage fronto-parietal and subcortical control networks, whereas monolinguals utilize temporal regions, reflecting more reliance on sensory processes, for ambiguity resolution. Data collection is ongoing for the children, but when comparing bilingual and monolingual 8–10-year-olds, bilinguals show more focal recruitment of fronto-temporal regions, like IFG, and reduced reliance on posterior areas compared to monolinguals, reflecting a more adult-like pattern of CC network activation than monolinguals. These findings support the view that bilingual experience can alter neural systems underlying syntactic ambiguity resolution and highlight the value of studying English-Hawaiian bilinguals to expand bilingual research to understudied language groups.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging