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What Children's Brains Reveal About Learning Grammar
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Tanzida Zaman1, Devin Casenhiser1; 1University of Tennessee Health Science Center
An essential component of language acquisition is the brain’s ability to integrate linguistic units—syllables into words, words into phrases, and phrases into clauses. A growing body of research suggests that this hierarchical integration is supported by neural synchrony: the alignment of neural oscillations with the temporal structure of speech. This synchrony enables listeners to track linguistic boundaries in real time. While adult studies have demonstrated that prosodic features can aid syntactic processing, much less is known about how these mechanisms operate in early childhood. Moreover, prior research often confounds syntactic and prosodic cues, making it difficult to determine their individual contributions to grammar acquisition. This study investigates the developmental trajectory of syntactic processing and the role of prosody in supporting this process in young children. We tested two groups: pre-syntactic (2-year-olds) and post-syntactic (4-year-olds), using a multimodal neuroimaging approach that combines electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). EEG captures the temporal dynamics of neural synchrony during syntactic processing, while fNIRS monitors hemodynamic activity in bilateral temporal and prefrontal cortices associated with language processing. Thirty typically developing children (fifteen in each age group) participated. Following acclimatization and standardized language assessments (ROWPVT-4 and CELF-P), children passively listened to short sentences across three conditions: (1) Regular Prosody – infant-directed speech with a simple subject-verb-object structure; (2) No Prosody – the same words delivered with flattened, monotonic intonation; and (3) Prosody-Only – phoneme-reversed utterances preserving prosodic contours. Stimuli were presented at ~70 dB with visual animations to maintain engagement. Each trial lasted six seconds; the full session was approximately 18 minutes. To examine syntactic processing, we will compute Mutual Information (MI) between EEG signals and vector representations of abstract syntactic structures, focusing on phrase and sentence boundaries. Higher MI values reflect stronger neural synchrony aligned with grammatical structure. We hypothesize that 4-year-olds will exhibit greater MI at syntactic boundaries than 2-year-olds, and that MI will be highest in the regular prosody condition, followed by prosody-only and no-prosody. This pattern would suggest that prosody facilitates syntactic tracking, especially in younger children. Complementing the EEG data, we expect fNIRS to reveal greater oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) concentrations in bilateral temporal and prefrontal regions during the regular prosody condition, particularly in the older group. Reduced activation is anticipated in the no-prosody condition, with prosody-only showing intermediate responses. These findings aim to clarify how prosodic features scaffold syntactic development during early childhood. The results will contribute to theoretical models of language learning and will be able to inform clinical strategies for supporting language development in children with delayed or atypical grammar acquisition.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics