Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Tracking Brain Activity in Language Cortical Regions During Naturalistic Social Interaction in Early Childhood
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Pauline Maes1, Meryem Yücel1, Helen Tager-Flubserg1; 1Boston University
Background: In adults, language processing is typically left-lateralized, engaging three canonical regions of the cortex: the inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. These regions appear to be established during childhood, though they continue to specialize throughout development into early adolescence. Children under the age of nine tend to exhibit reduced lateralization, with relatively greater right-hemisphere activation in temporal regions compared to adults. Most neuroimaging studies of language processing have focused on isolated components of phonology, semantics, or syntax. Yet, language is inherently social and typically unfolds in dynamic, interactive contexts. In real-life settings, individuals rarely process language in isolation or in response to brief artificial auditory stimuli. Instead, language comprehension often occurs in rich, multimodal environments that demand the integration of linguistic and social information, and is typically followed by language production. Studies using more naturalistic stimuli, such as short stories or lullabies presented with visual supports, have reported more diffuse activation patterns across both hemispheres, including regions associated with language and social cognition. Our understanding of how the brains of children younger than seven process language remains limited, in part because this age group is significantly underrepresented in fMRI research. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a wearable, silent, and relatively movement-tolerant imaging method, has recently shown promise in addressing this gap by enabling the study of brain activity in more naturalistic, socially interactive contexts. Aim: The objective of the current study is to investigate how young typically developing children’s brains process language during both comprehension and production in everyday situations. Methods: Brain responses to language will be examined across three increasingly naturalistic contexts: a movie-viewing task, a sentence repetition task, and dyadic conversations embedded within an experimenter-child play-based interaction. In the movie-viewing task, children are presented with a short story visually supported by a movie. In the sentence repetition task, the experimenter produces a short sentence and instructs the child to repeat it. During the play-based interaction, the experimenter and child engage in three different play activities (pretend play with figurines, Pop the Pig, and construction with magnetic tiles) while having a natural conversation. Within this interaction, we will identify and extract sequences of dyadic back-and-forth exchange (e.g., child–experimenter–child–experimenter or experimenter–child–experimenter–child turn-taking patterns) and analyze brain activity specifically during those conversational moments. Brain activity across all three contexts will be recorded using a portable, fibreless NIRx NIRSport2 system, equipped with 16 sources, 15 long-separation detectors, and 8 short-separation detectors. The optode layout is designed to bilaterally cover anterior and posterior cortical regions, specifically targeting the middle and inferior frontal gyri, the temporo-parietal junction, and parts of the superior temporal lobe. The source-detector distance is approximately 30mm. Possible outcomes: We expect to observe diffuse patterns of activation across both hemispheres, consistent with prior work using naturalistic stimuli. As task demands become more socially embedded and ecologically valid, we anticipate increased functional connectivity between anterior and posterior regions across the left and right hemispheres.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Language Production