Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders, San Diego State University and UC San Diego, United States.
Louisiana State University, United States; The University of Delaware, United States.
Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2022 Dec;58:101185. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101185. Epub 2022 Dec 11.
Implicit learning about new words by picking up on associative information in the contexts they appear in is an important aspect of vocabulary growth. The current study investigated the neural correlates that underlie how school-aged children and adolescents identify the meaning of novel words embedded within sentence contexts. Importantly, we examine how differences in the brain response to novel words and their context differ as a function of 1) explicit learning success, i.e., whether novel word meanings can be correctly estimated in isolation after a learning opportunity, and 2) individual differences in offline language aptitude as well as age across our cohort (N = 82; 8-16 years). Using a regression-based analysis, we identified the unique influence of these individuals difference metrics by using both measures within the same series of models. The most notable finding from our analysis was a frequency-specific dissociation between the way age and language abilities held relationships with task-relevant oscillatory activity during the novel word meaning task: language abilities associated with task-relevant changes in beta band activity during sentence processing, while age associated with task-relevant changes in theta band activity during pseudoword processing. These effects reflect the how the neural correlates of mapping semantic meaning from sentence contexts-an important skill for word learning-is uniquely influenced by the maturity of language abilities as well as age.
通过在新单词出现的语境中获取联想信息来进行隐性学习是词汇增长的一个重要方面。本研究调查了潜在的神经关联，这些关联是理解儿童和青少年如何识别嵌入句子语境中的新单词的意义。重要的是，我们研究了大脑对新单词及其语境的反应差异如何随以下因素而变化：1）显性学习的成功，即是否可以在学习机会之后独立正确估计新单词的含义；2）个体在离线语言能力方面的差异，以及我们队列中的年龄差异（N=82；8-16 岁）。我们使用基于回归的分析方法，通过在同一系列模型中同时使用这两种度量标准，确定了这些个体差异度量标准的独特影响。我们分析中最显著的发现是，在新单词意义任务中，年龄和语言能力与任务相关的振荡活动之间的关系存在频率特异性分离：语言能力与句子处理过程中β波段活动的任务相关变化有关，而年龄与伪词处理过程中θ波段活动的任务相关变化有关。这些效应反映了从句子语境中映射语义意义的神经关联——这是词汇学习的重要技能——如何受到语言能力成熟度和年龄的独特影响。
