Preschoolers' brains rely on semantic cues prior to the mastery of syntax during sentence comprehension

Abstract

Sentence comprehension requires the integration of both syntactic and semantic information, the acquisition of which seems to have different trajectories in the developing brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural correlates underlying syntactic and semantic processing during auditory sentence comprehension as well as its development in preschool children by manipulating case marking and animacy hierarchy cues, respectively. A functional segregation was observed within Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus for adults, where the pars opercularis was involved in syntactic processing and the pars triangularis in semantic processing. By contrast, five-year-old children sensitive to animacy hierarchy cues showed diffuse activation for semantic processing in the left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices. While no main effect of case marking was found in the left fronto-temporal language network, children with better syntactic skills showed greater neural responses for syntactically complex sentences, most prominently in the posterior superior temporal cortex. The current study provides both behavioral and neural evidence that five-year-old children compared to adults rely more on semantic information than on syntactic cues during sentence comprehension, but with the development of syntactic abilities, their brain activation in the left fronto-temporal network increases for syntactic processing.

Universal neural basis of structure building evidenced by network modulations emerging from Broca's area: The case of Chinese

“…The left fronto‐temporal network for syntactic processing has been supported by neuroimaging evidence from German (e.g., Bornkessel, Zysset, Friederici, von Cramon, & Schlesewsky, ; Fiebach, Schlesewsky, Lohmann, von Cramon, & Friederici, ; Goucha & Friederici, ; Grewe et al, ; Wu, Vissiennon, Friederici, & Brauer, ), French (e.g., Pallier et al, ; Pattamadilok, Dehaene, & Pallier, ), and English (e.g., Constable et al, ; Mack, Meltzer‐Asscher, Barbieri, & Thompson, ). If syntactic computation is the fundamental linguistic capacity in all human languages regardless of typological differences, it is plausible that the same brain region is dedicated to syntactic computation universally.…”

Cortical thickness lateralization and its relation to language abilities in children

“…An adjustment was justified due to the fact that some of the items were not suitable for children (e.g., using a broom, writing a letter), which were excluded from the Inventory in the present study. This modified version has been frequently and successfully used in previous studies (Skeide et al, 2016; Wu et al, 2016), resulting in a continuous score as an indicator of the extent of handedness. After exclusion, a total of 56 children (26 girls) were included in the present study.…”

Young children’s sentence comprehension: Neural correlates of syntax-semantic competition

“…In that study, which varied sentence case-marking and semantic plausibility, the localization of case-marking only became gradually independent from semantics between the ages of 3 and 7 years. A more recent fMRI study, again investigating the processing of syntactic (case-marking) and semantic (animacy) cues during sentence comprehension ( Wu, Vissiennon, Friederici, & Brauer, 2016 ), found developmental brain activation differences in relation to these cues. In adults, a functional dissociation of Broca's area in the left IFG was observed, with the main effect of syntactic case-marking in left BA 44 and the main effect of semantic animacy in left BA 45.…”