A new paper appears in this month’s Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences by lead author Ioulia Kovelman. This paper reports results from three studies, two from Ioulia’s lab, and a third from our on-going M-Cubed funded work on neural correlates of language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders conducted in collaboration with Ioulia Kovelman, Renee Lajiness O’Neill, and Susan Bowyer. In this report we describe a preliminary analysis using a classifier trained on gamma connectivity recorded while subjects rest and while they passively listened to an unknown language to predict diagnostic status.
Kovelman, I., Wagley, N., Hay, J. S. F., Ugolini, M., Bowyer, S., Lajiness-O’Neill, R., & Brennan, J. (2015). Multimodal imaging of temporal processing in typical and atypical language development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1337, 7–15. doi: 10.1111/nyas.12688
Abstract
New approaches to understanding language and reading acquisition propose that the human brain’s ability to synchronize its neural firing rate to syllable-length linguistic units may be important to children’s ability to acquire human language. Yet, little evidence from brain imaging studies has been available to support this proposal. Here, we summarize three recent brain imaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG)) studies from our laboratories with young English-speaking children (aged 6–12 years). In the first study (fNIRS), we used an auditory beat perception task to show that, in children, the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) responds preferentially to rhythmic beats at 1.5 Hz. In the second study (fMRI), we found correlations between children’s amplitude rise–time sensitivity, phonological awareness, and brain activation in the left STG. In the third study (MEG), typically developing children outperformed children with autism spectrum disorder in extracting words from rhythmically rich foreign speech and displayed different brain activation during the learning phase. The overall findings suggest that the efficiency with which left temporal regions process slow temporal (rhythmic) information may be important for gains in language and reading proficiency. These findings carry implications for better understanding of the brain’s mechanisms that support language and reading acquisition during both typical and atypical development.