The Bilingual Reading Brain: A Developmental and Crosslinguistic Perspective

Learning to read reshapes both cognition and the brain. Across the world, bilingual and multilingual children face the challenge of acquiring literacy skills in one or more languages. Research on bilingual literacy provides valuable insights into neurodevelopment by examining how educational, linguistic, and orthographic differences shape children's emerging neural architecture for reading. This review highlights three key findings from current neuroimaging studies on bilingual child literacy. First, it underscores the role of crosslinguistic transfer, a hallmark of bilingualism that differentiates children who speak different language pairs. Findings on crosslinguistic transfer shed light on how underlying dual-language structures and experiences of learning to read interact to shape children's literacy and brain development. Second, the review revisits the persistent perception of bilingual delays, demonstrating that dual-language experiences can effectively support neural mechanisms critical for the development of language and reading comprehension. Finally, we argue that a deeper understanding of neural plasticity in bilingual reading development can help support all learners—including those with dyslexia—in achieving literacy and biliteracy across languages.