Children who are regularly engaged in conversation by adults may have stronger connections between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas — brain regions critical for the comprehension and production of speech, according to new research led by Rachel Romeo of Boston Children’s Hospital and MIT. The results were independent of parental income and education, suggesting that talking with children from an early age could promote their language skills regardless of socioeconomic status (SES).
Romeo et al suggest talking with children from early age could promote language skills regardless of socioeconomic status. Image credit: Sasin Tipchai.
Although decades of research have established a relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s brain development, the specifics of this connection are not known.
The so-called word gap — the influential finding from the early 1990s that school-age children who grew up in lower-SES households have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent classmates — and other evidence demonstrating an influence of early language exposure on later language ability suggests a potential influence of language experience on brain structure.
In their neuroimaging study of 40 children (ages 4-6 years, 27 male/13 female) and their parents of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, Romeo and co-authors found that greater conversational turn-taking was related to stronger connections between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas.
“By measuring the real-world language exposure of young children, we confirmed the hypothesis that greater adult-child conversational experience, independent of SES and the sheer amount of adult speech, is related to stronger, more coherent white matter connectivity in the left arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi on average, and specifically near their anterior termination at Broca’s area in left inferior frontal cortex,” the researchers said.
“Our findings suggest that early intervention programs aiming to close the achievement gap may focus on increasing children’s conversational exposure in order to capitalize on the early neural plasticity underlying cognitive development.”
The results appear in the Journal of Neuroscience.
_____
Rachel R. Romeo et al. Language Exposure Relates to Structural Neural Connectivity in Childhood. Journal of Neuroscience, published online August 13, 2018; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0484-18.2018
