Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University, CA, United States.
Brain Lang. 2010 Aug;114(2):72-9. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2009.11.006. Epub 2010 Jan 6.
The purpose of this study was to explore changes in activation of the cortical network that serves auditory sentence comprehension in children in response to increasing demands of complex sentences. A further goal is to study how individual differences in children's receptive language abilities are associated with such changes in cortical responses. Fourteen children, 10-16 years old, participated in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment using a cross modal sentence-picture verification paradigm. We manipulated sentence difficulty and length in a 2x2 factorial design. Task-related activation covered large regions of the left and right superior temporal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, precuneous, cingulate, middle frontal gyrus and precentral gyrus. Sentence difficulty, independent of length, led to increased activation in the left temporal-parietal junction and right superior temporal gyrus. Changes in activation in frontal regions positively correlated with age-standardized receptive vocabulary scores and negatively correlated with reaction time on a receptive grammar test outside the scanner. Thus, individual differences in language skills were associated with changes in the network in response to changing task demands. These preliminary findings in a small sample of typically developing children suggest that the investigation of individual differences may prove useful in elucidating the underlying neural mechanisms of language disorders in children.
本研究旨在探讨儿童在处理复杂句子时，大脑中负责听觉句子理解的皮质网络的激活变化。进一步的目标是研究儿童接受性语言能力的个体差异与皮质反应变化的关系。14 名 10-16 岁的儿童参与了一项使用跨模态句子-图片验证范式的事件相关功能磁共振成像实验。我们在 2x2 因子设计中操纵句子的难度和长度。任务相关的激活覆盖了左、右颞上回、下顶叶、楔前叶、扣带回、中额回和中央前回的大片区域。句子难度，不依赖于长度，导致左颞顶连接区和右颞上回的激活增加。额叶区域的激活变化与年龄标准化的接受性词汇得分呈正相关，与扫描外接受性语法测试的反应时间呈负相关。因此，语言技能的个体差异与响应变化任务需求的网络变化有关。这项在典型发育儿童中进行的小样本初步研究表明，对个体差异的研究可能有助于阐明儿童语言障碍的潜在神经机制。
