There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Previous studies indicate that adults show specialized syntactic and semantic processes
in both the temporal and frontal lobes during language comprehension. Neuro-cognitive
models of language development argue that this specialization appears earlier in the
temporal than the frontal lobe. However, there is little evidence supporting this
proposed progression. Our recently published study (Wang, Rice, & Booth, 2020), using
multivoxel pattern analyses, detected that children as young as 5 to 6 years old exhibit
specialization and integration in the temporal lobe, but not the frontal lobe. In
the current study, we used the same approach to examine semantic and syntactic specialization
in children ages 7 to 8 years old. We found support for semantic specialization in
the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) for correct sentences and in the triangular part
of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for incorrect sentences. We also found that
the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) played an integration role and was sensitive
to both semantic and syntactic processing during both correct and incorrect sentence
processing. However, there was no support for syntactic specialization in 7- to 8-year-old
children. As compared to our previous study on 5- to 6-year-old children, which only
showed semantic specialization in the temporal lobe, the current study suggests a
developmental progression to semantic specialization in the frontal lobe. This project
represents an important step forward in testing neuro-cognitive models of language
processing in children.