| Title | Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults Says New Finding | |
| Date | Sunday September 13 2020, @09:15AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the do-you-hear-how-I-hear? dept. | ||
Children use both brain hemispheres to understand language, unlike adults says new finding:
The study, published Sept. 7, 2020, in PNAS, focuses on one task — language — and finds that to understand language (more specifically, processing spoken sentences), children use both hemispheres. This finding fits with previous and ongoing research led by Georgetown neurology professor Elissa L. Newport, PhD, a former postdoctoral fellow Olumide Olulade, MD, PhD, and neurology assistant professor Anna Greenwald, PhD.
[...] Their study solves a mystery that has puzzled clinicians and neuroscientists for a long time, says Newport.
In almost all adults, sentence processing is possible only in the left hemisphere, according to both brain scanning research and clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke.
But in very young children, damage to either hemisphere is unlikely to result in language deficits; language can be recovered in many patients even if the left hemisphere is severely damaged. These facts suggest that language is distributed to both hemispheres early in life, Newport says. However, traditional scanning had not revealed the details of these phenomena until now. "It was unclear whether strong left dominance for language is present at birth or appears gradually during development," explains Newport.
Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyzed in a more complex way, the researchers have shown that the adult lateralization pattern is not established in young children and that both hemispheres participate in language during early development.
Brain networks that localize specific tasks to one or the other hemisphere start during childhood but are not complete until a child is about 10 or 11, she says. "We now have a better platform upon which to understand brain injury and recovery."
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