Groundbreaking Neuroscience Research Finds Talking with Young Children Improves Language Regions of Developing Brain
In a recent neuroimaging study of 40 children published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers have identified a positive relationship between adult-child conversation and connections between brain regions critical for the comprehension and production of speech. While it is well known that early language exposure affects children’s linguistic and cognitive skills and academic achievement in later years (thanks for decades of work by BWGRN members!) this research is significant because it provides evidence supporting a specific link between language exposure and neuroanatomy. Read the full article here.
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“The amount of adult-child conversational turns that young children experience is related to the strength of white matter connections between two key language regions in the brain, as represented by the colored brain regions from two participants. Although both children are the same age and gender, and from the same socioeconomic background, they differ in the number of conversational turns experienced, which relates to the strength of white matter connectivity in these pathways.”
Credit: Romeo et al., JNeurosci (2018) |