Early and late talkers: school-age language, literacy and neurolinguistic differences

Number 1609
Year 2010
Drawer 28
Entry Date 08/23/2010
Authors Preston, J.L., Frost, S.J., Mencl, W.E., Fulbright, R.K., Landi, N., Grigorenko, E., Jacobsen, L., & Pugh, K.R.
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Publication Brain, v. 133, pp. 2185-2195.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1609.pdf
Abstract Early language development sets the stage for a lifetime of competence in language and literacy. However, the neural mechanisms associated with the relative advantages of early communication success, or the disadvantages of having delayed language development, are not well explored. In this study, 174 elementary school-age children whose parents reported that they started forming sentences ‘early’, ‘on-time or ‘late’ were evaluated with standardized measures of language, reading and spelling. All oral and written language measures revealed consistent patterns for ‘early’ talkers to have the highest level of performance and ‘late’ talkers to have the lowest level of performance. We report functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a subset of early, on-time and late talkers matched for age, gender and performance intelligence quotient that allows evaluation of neural activation patterns produced while listening to and reading real words and pronounceable non-words. Activation in bilateral thalamus and putamen, and left insula and superior temporal gyrus during these tasks was significantly lower in late takers, demonstrating that residual effects of being a later talker are found not only in behavioral tests of oral and written language, but also in distributed cortical-subcortical neural circuits underlying speech and print processing. Moreover, these finding suggest that the age of functional language acquisition can have long-reaching effects on reading and language behaviour, and on the corresponding neurocircuity that supports linguistic function into the school-age years.
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