Atanasova Tanja, Fargier Raphaël, Zesiger Pascal, Laganaro Marina
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2020 Nov 1;2(1):1-21. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00024. eCollection 2021.
Changes in word production occur across the lifespan. Previous studies have shown electrophysiological, temporal, and functional differences between children and adults accompanying behavioral changes in picture-naming tasks (Laganaro, Tzieropoulos, Fraunfelder, & Zesiger, 2015). Thus, a shift toward adult-like processes in referential word production occurs somewhere between the ages of 13 and 20. Our aim was to investigate when and how children develop adult-like behavior and brain activation in word production. Toward this aim, performance and event-related potentials (ERP) in a referential word production task were recorded and compared for two groups of adolescents (aged 14 to 16 and 17 to 18), children (aged 10 to 13), and young adults (aged 20 to 30). Both groups of adolescents displayed adult-like production latencies, which were longer only for children, while accuracy was lower in the younger adolescents and in children, compared to adults. ERP waveform analysis and topographic pattern analysis revealed significant intergroup differences in key time-windows on stimulus-locked ERPs, both early (150-220 ms)-associated with pre-linguistic processes-and late (280-330 ms)-associated with lexical processes. The results indicate that brain activation underlying referential word production is completely adult-like in 17-year-old adolescents, whereas an intermediate pattern is still observed in adolescents aged 14 to 16 years old, although their production speed, but not their accuracy, is already adult-like.
词汇生成的变化贯穿人的一生。先前的研究表明，在图片命名任务中的行为变化伴随着儿童和成人在电生理、时间和功能上的差异（拉加纳罗、齐耶罗普洛斯、弗劳恩费尔德和泽西格，2015年）。因此，在指示性词汇生成中向类似成人的过程转变发生在13岁至20岁之间的某个阶段。我们的目的是研究儿童在何时以及如何发展出类似成人的行为和词汇生成中的大脑激活模式。为了实现这一目标，我们记录并比较了两组青少年（14至16岁和17至18岁）、儿童（10至13岁）和年轻成年人（20至30岁）在指示性词汇生成任务中的表现和事件相关电位（ERP）。两组青少年都表现出类似成人的生成潜伏期，只有儿童的潜伏期更长，而与成年人相比，年龄较小的青少年和儿童的准确性较低。ERP波形分析和地形图模式分析显示，在刺激锁定ERP的关键时间窗口中存在显著的组间差异，包括早期（150 - 220毫秒）——与语言前过程相关——和晚期（280 - 330毫秒）——与词汇过程相关。结果表明，17岁青少年指示性词汇生成背后的大脑激活模式已完全类似成人，而14至16岁的青少年虽然其生成速度已类似成人，但准确性仍未达到成人水平，仍观察到一种中间模式。
