ArticleJournal of cognitive neuroscience2020
Syntactic and Semantic Specialization and Integration in 5- to 6-Year-Old Children during Auditory Sentence Processing.
Article in Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neurobiology of language in autism: a systematic review of pediatric studies.Brain imaging and behavior · 2026Pooled it
- The emergence of the language system in the toddler brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neuro-cognitive development of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping in 7- to 9-year-old children.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2025Article
- Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship with literacy development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship to literacy development.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Syntactic and semantic specialization in 9- to 10-year-old children during auditory sentence processing.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Neural specificity for semantic and syntactic processing in Spanish-English bilingual children.Brain and language · 2024Article
- Neural Correlates of Morphosyntactic Processing in Spanish-English Bilingual Children: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2023Article
- A longitudinal neuroimaging dataset on language processing in children ages 5, 7, and 9 years old.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Semantic and syntactic specialization during auditory sentence processing in 7-8-year-old children.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2021Article
- Article
- Neuro-cognitive development of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping in 6- to 7.5-year-old children.NeuroImage · 2021Article
- Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network.Cognition · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Previous studies have found specialized syntactic and semantic processes in the adult brain during language comprehension. Young children have sophisticated semantic and syntactic aspects of language, yet many previous fMRI studies failed to detect this specialization, possibly due to experimental design and analytical methods. In this current study, 5- to 6-year-old children completed a syntactic task and a semantic task to dissociate these two processes. Multivoxel pattern analysis was used to examine the correlation of patterns within a task (between runs) or across tasks. We found that the left middle temporal gyrus showed more similar patterns within the semantic task compared with across tasks, whereas there was no difference in the correlation within the syntactic task compared with across tasks, suggesting its specialization in semantic processing. Moreover, the left superior temporal gyrus showed more similar patterns within both the semantic task and the syntactic task as compared with across tasks, suggesting its role in integration of semantic and syntactic information. In contrast to the temporal lobe, we did not find specialization or integration effects in either the opercular or triangular part of the inferior frontal gyrus. Overall, our study showed that 5- to 6-year-old children have already developed specialization and integration in the temporal lobe, but not in the frontal lobe, consistent with developmental neurocognitive models of language comprehension in typically developing young children.
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