Neural basis of language development

old_uid14035
titleNeural basis of language development
start_date2014/05/22
schedule10h-12h
onlineno
location_info3e étage, salle Las Vergnas
summaryEvery child learns the language he or she is born into. This requires that the language system is open at the beginning and develops towards a given mother tongue depending on the input. Language-specific behavior is already present shortly after birth when considering intonational aspects, and neurophysiological data indicate that even grammatical dependencies between words can be learned by the age of 5 months when phonologically coded. Word learning starts to take place during the first year of life and accelerates around 14 months during the so-called vocabulary spurt. These processes are supported by brain areas bound together by fiber tracts which are already present at birth. Syntactic abilities, in contrast, develop at a slower pace: initial syntactic knowledge is present around the age of 2 years, and it takes until school age before complex syntax is mastered. This developmental trajectory is determined by the maturation of the fiber tract connecting the syntax-relevant brain regions in the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior temporal cortex in the left hemisphere.
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