Krishnan, Saloni; Leech, Robert; Mercure, Evelyne; Lloyd-Fox, Sarah and Dick, Frederic. 2015. Convergent and Divergent fMRI Responses in Children and Adults to Increasing Language Production Demands. Cerebral Cortex, 25(10), pp. 3261-3277. ISSN 1047-3211 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

In adults, patterns of neural activation associated with perhaps the most basic language skill—overt object naming—are extensively modulated by the psycholinguistic and visual complexity of the stimuli. Do children's brains react similarly when confronted with increasing processing demands, or they solve this problem in a different way? Here we scanned 37 children aged 7–13 and 19 young adults who performed a well-normed picture-naming task with 3 levels of difficulty. While neural organization for naming was largely similar in childhood and adulthood, adults had greater activation in all naming conditions over inferior temporal gyri and superior temporal gyri/supramarginal gyri. Manipulating naming complexity affected adults and children quite differently: neural activation, especially over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, showed complexity-dependent increases in adults, but complexity-dependent decreases in children. These represent fundamentally different responses to the linguistic and conceptual challenges of a simple naming task that makes no demands on literacy or metalinguistics. We discuss how these neural differences might result from different cognitive strategies used by adults and children during lexical retrieval/production as well as developmental changes in brain structure and functional connectivity.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhu120
Additional Information:	Medical Research Council Grant [G0400341] and the Waterloo Foundation. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by the Medical Research Council via a block grant to Birkbeck, University of London.
Keywords:	development, fMRI, language production, task difficulty, word generation
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 6 June 2014 Published Online October 2015 Published
Item ID:	32833
Date Deposited:	20 Dec 2022 10:38
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2022 10:47
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/32833

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