Syntax gradually segregates from semantics in the developing brain

Skeide, Michael; Bräuer, Jens; Friederici, Angela D.

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.05.080

Cited by 80 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Some studies found that children only started to process this kind of complex sentences at the age of five (Chan et al, 2009, Lindner, 2003), while others did not report above chance-level understanding from children before the age of seven (Schipke et al, 2012). Skeide et al (2014) using a lead-in sentence, however, reported that even children between 3 and 4 years of age were capable of processing more complex sentences than the ones used in the present study. In a picture matching task children showed above chance-level performance on subject- as well as object-relative clauses.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 80%

“…The pSTG has been assigned an integrating role with respect to the syntactic information related to verb-argument structures. The absence of a WORDORDER effect in the frontal areas might be attributed to less specialization at the age of our participants (Skeide et al, 2014, Wu et al, 2016), and therefore these regions still showed a non-distinct activation level for both complexity conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…The posterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus has been reported previously to subserve syntactic processing in children (Skeide et al, 2014, Wu et al, 2016) as well as in adults (Friederici et al, 2009, Grodzinsky and Friederici, 2006, Santi and Grodzinsky, 2010). The absence of an age effect in the left pSTG is in line with our expectations suggested by Skeide et al (2014). In their study, children between three to four years of age show an interaction between syntax and semantics in the left pSTG.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…As demonstrated in a study on syntactic and semantic interaction in three- to ten-year-old children (Skeide et al, 2014), the specialization of the language network is gradually established as development progresses. The authors investigated sentence comprehension in children from three age groups (ages of three to four, six to seven, and nine to ten) using a picture matching task in which syntactic complexity and semantic plausibility of relative clauses were varied.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Functional organization of the language network in three- and six-year-old children

et al. 2017

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The organization of the language network undergoes continuous changes during development as children learn to understand sentences. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral measures were utilized to investigate functional activation and functional connectivity (FC) in three-year-old (3yo) and six-year-old (6yo) children during sentence comprehension. Transitive German sentences varying the word order (subject-initial and object-initial) with case marking were presented auditorily. We selected children who were capable of processing the subject-initial sentences above chance level accuracy from each age group to ensure that we were tapping real comprehension. Both age groups showed a main effect of word order in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), with greater activation for object-initial compared to subject-initial sentences. However, age differences were observed in the FC between left pSTG and the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). The 6yo group showed stronger FC between the left pSTG and Brodmann area (BA) 44 of the left IFG compared to the 3yo group. For the 3yo group, in turn, the FC between left pSTG and left BA 45 was stronger than with left BA 44. Our study demonstrates that while task-related activation was comparable, the small behavioral differences between age groups were reflected in the underlying functional organization revealing the ongoing development of the neural language network.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 80%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Functional organization of the language network in three- and six-year-old children

et al. 2017

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“…First, fMRI studies (15,31) have found increased activation in a similar region of mid-left STG/STS in response to implausible noun-verb combinations that violate a verb's selectional restrictions (e.g., "the thunderstorm was ironed") (but see ref. 32 for conflicting results).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex

Frankland

Greene

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

115

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Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of “bite,” “dog,” and “man,” we can think about a dog biting a man, or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes “who did what to whom” in visually presented sentences. We find that lmSTC represents the current values of abstract semantic variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in distinct subregions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC whose activity patterns (i) facilitate decoding of structure-dependent sentence meaning (“Who did what to whom?”) and (ii) predict affect-related amygdala responses that depend on this information (e.g., “the baby kicked the grandfather” vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then identifies distinct, but neighboring, subregions of lmSTC whose activity patterns carry information about the identity of the current “agent” (“Who did it?”) and the current “patient” (“To whom was it done?”). These neighboring subregions lie along the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high level, these regions may function like topographically defined data registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic variables. This functional architecture, which in key respects resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts.

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Neurolinguistic Studies of Sentence Comprehension

Skeide

Friederici

2017

The Handbook of Psycholinguistics

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Syntax gradually segregates from semantics in the developing brain

Cited by 80 publications

References 31 publications

Functional organization of the language network in three- and six-year-old children

Functional organization of the language network in three- and six-year-old children

An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex

Neurolinguistic Studies of Sentence Comprehension

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