ArticleHuman brain mapping2018
Neural specialization of phonological and semantic processing in young children.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Is functional MRI a reliable surrogate for the Wada test for preoperative assessment of hemispheric language laterality in pediatric patients? A systematic review and meta-analysis.Neuroradiology · 2025Pooled it
- The effects of interactive reading on young children's narrative abilities: a meta-analytic study.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Domain-general and language-specific brain networks are differentially associated with verbal intelligence during development.iScience · 2026Article
- Meanings within words: How Chinese bilingualism shapes the neural basis of English morphological processing in preschoolers.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Relation of Home Literacy Environment to Brain Specialization and Sensitivity for Phonological and Semantic Processing of Spoken Words.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Language comprehension in chronic aphasia relies on the language network, not the Multiple Demand network.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- The Ventral Attention Network Mediates Attentional Reorienting to Cross-Modal Expectancy Violations: Evidence from EEG and fMRI.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Lexical Representations in the Common and Specific Neural Networks for Visual, Phonological, and Semantic Processing in Chinese Reading.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Subjective cognitive decline in major depressive patients is associated with altered entropy and connectivity changes of temporal and insular region.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Article
- Examining the role of phonological and semantic mechanisms during morphological processing of sentences in 7-year-old children.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Earlier connectivity and specialization predict longitudinal changes in phonological and semantic specialization in 7- to 9-year-old children.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Distinct connectivity patterns between perception and attention-related brain networks characterize dyslexia: Machine learning applied to resting-state fMRI.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2024Article
- Syntactic and semantic specialization in 9- to 10-year-old children during auditory sentence processing.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Functional dissociation of the language network and other cognition in early childhood.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Neural substrates of L2-L1 transfer effects on phonological awareness in young Chinese-English bilingual children.NeuroImage · 2024Article
- Action video games normalise the phonemic awareness in pre-readers at risk for developmental dyslexia.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- High-level language brain regions process sublexical regularities.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Reduced Neural Specialization for Word-level Linguistic Prosody in Children with Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2023Article
- Phonological and Semantic Specialization in 9- to 10-Year-Old Children During Auditory Word Processing.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
This study aimed to examine early specialization of brain regions for phonological and semantic processing of spoken language in young children. Thirty-five typically developing children aged from 5 to 6 years performed auditory phonological (same sound judgment) and semantic (related meaning judgment) word-level tasks. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined specialization within the language network, by conducting three levels of analysis. First, we directly compared activation between tasks and found a greater sound judgment as compared to meaning judgment activation in left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and supramarginal gyrus. In contrast, greater meaning judgment as compared to sound judgment task activation was found in left middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Second, we examined the brain-behavior correlations and found that phonological skill was correlated with the task difference in activation in left superior temporal sulcus, whereas semantic skill was correlated with the task difference in activation in left MTG. Third, we compared between two experimental conditions within each task and found a parametric effect in left STG for the sound judgment task, and a parametric effect in left MTG for the meaning judgment task. The results of this study indicate that, by the age of 5-6 years, typically developing children already show some specialization of temporo-parietal brain regions for phonological and semantic processes. However, there were no task differences in the left inferior frontal gyrus suggesting that the frontal cortex may not yet be specialized in this age range, which is consistent with the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.