Preston, J. L., Frost, S. J., Mencl, W., Fulbright, R. K., Landi, N., Grigorenko, E., & ... Pugh, K. R. (2010). Early and late talkers: school-age language, literacy and neurolinguistic differences. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 133(8), 2185-2195. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
I chose this article because after reading chapter 7 in the textbook, I wanted to know more about the maturation of speech related areas in the brain and how the differences in the maturation of these areas affect language development in children. The purpose of this study was to examine the neural systems and their activation level differences that are involved in early or late language development. This study involved 174 children from four years old to eight years old who were behaviorally assessed along with many also being examined by fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), in which the children had to identify pictures and words in order to examine functional activation differences among them. Parents were asked to report whether or not their child began speaking two to three word sentences early (49 participants), on time (89 participants), or late (36 participants). Several standardized tests were administered to the children that measured their intelligence as well as their reading, vocabulary, and phonological skills. The researchers found that the children who were identified by their parents as early talkers performed significantly higher on all of the performance tests, with the late talkers performing significantly lower. The fMRI found in several different areas of the brain many activation differences between the early talkers and late talkers. The children who were identified by their parents as early talkers displayed higher levels of activation in the left and right thalamus, the left superior temporal gyrus, and the right and left putamen, globus pallidus, and insula. A new discovery in this study was the important role of the thalamus and putamen in early language proficiency and how if these activation levels are low, then a person will have significant difficulty in reading and listening later on in life. These cortical activation differences that were found in this study as well as previous studies demonstrate the function of this area in understanding and expressing speech. In summary, this study helped to support the idea that higher scores on performance tests suggest that these children developed language earlier than others possibly due to the levels of activation in certain brain areas. Although many neural differences have been identified through this study and many others, there is still not a single explanation for them. According to this study, the bio-psycho-social approach is the best way to overall summarize these neural differences.
Okay this may be a stupid comment, but this post just made me think... Could a baby's neural connections, though sparse, start forming prenatally and be activated from the outside world? Isn't it true that babies can hear their mother's voice inside her tummy and then be able to recognize it when it is born? I thought I read that somewhere, anyways. But I think if mothers started letting there unborn child listen to voices in early development, say in later gestational periods, maybe these language areas would be activiated early on, so as to strenthen weaker areas of a brain that may otherwise propose a problem for the the infant when it starts learning and comphrehending language. Just a thought..
ReplyDeleteI agree with Erin with mothers starting to let their unborn child listen to voice earlier. It was also an interesting article to read
ReplyDeleteMy third child talked really early and in sentences from the beginning, I always chalked it up to having older siblings to model after, but maybe it shaped her brain in different ways. Good article!
ReplyDeleteDenise