Syntactic and semantic specialization in 9- to 10-year-old children during auditory sentence processing

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Prior research has debated the neural separability of syntax and semantics.
• Previous studies in younger children (5-8 years) using fMRI and MVPA detected semantic but not syntactic specialization.
• This gap necessitates investigating older children with developed morpho-syntactic skills.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if older children exhibit specialized brain regions for syntactic processing.
• To determine the neural correlates of syntactic versus semantic information processing in 9- to 10-year-old children.
• To test the hypothesis of a core syntactic region in the brain.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to measure brain activity.
• Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to analyze brain activation patterns.
• Sixty-four 9- to 10-year-old children participated, undergoing the same experimental design as previous studies.

Main Results:

• The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis demonstrated sensitivity to syntactic information exclusively.
• The left superior temporal gyrus (STG), left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and IFG pars triangularis were sensitive to both semantic and syntactic information.
• No distinct specialization for syntax was found in the STG, MTG, or IFG pars triangularis.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the hypothesis that the left IFG pars opercularis is a core region for syntactic processing.
• The results suggest a lexicalized view of syntax, where semantically sensitive areas also play a role in syntactic processing.
• This indicates that syntactic and semantic processing may not be fully separable in the developing brain.