Differences in neural activation between preterm and full term born adolescents on a sentence comprehension task:...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Pediatrics

Background:

• Adolescent survivors of preterm birth often face functional challenges impacting academics.
• These difficulties persist despite normal scores on standardized cognitive and language assessments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate neural activation patterns during auditory sentence comprehension in adolescents born preterm versus full-term.
• To explore how brain activity differs based on sentence length and syntactic complexity.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activation in preterm (n=18) and full-term (n=14) adolescents (ages 9-16).
• Participants listened to sentences varying in length and syntactic difficulty.
• Cognitive and language abilities were assessed and found to be similar between groups.

Main Results:

• Interactions between group and sentence length were observed in both early and late trial phases.
• A significant interaction between group and syntactic difficulty emerged in the late phase.
• Preterm adolescents exhibited increased activation in the left and right middle frontal gyri as syntactic difficulty rose.

Conclusions:

• Preterm birth appears to alter brain-behavior relationships in sentence comprehension, particularly under increased task demands.
• Differences in neural processing suggest preterm survivors may benefit from educational accommodations, irrespective of standard academic test results.