Papers by Angela D Friederici
Cerebral Cortex, Nov 20, 2022
Within the first years of life, children learn major aspects of their native language. However, t... more Within the first years of life, children learn major aspects of their native language. However, the ability to process complex sentence structures, a core faculty in human language called syntax, emerges only slowly. A milestone in syntax acquisition is reached around the age of 4 years, when children learn a variety of syntactic concepts. Here, we ask which maturational changes in the child's brain underlie the emergence of syntactically complex sentence processing around this critical age. We relate markers of cortical brain maturation to 3-and 4-year-olds' sentence processing in contrast to other language abilities. Our results show that distinct cortical brain areas support sentence processing in the two age groups. Sentence production abilities at 3 years were associated with increased surface area in the most posterior part of the left superior temporal sulcus, whereas 4-year-olds showed an association with cortical thickness in the left posterior part of Broca's area, i.e. BA44. The present findings suggest that sentence processing abilities rely on the maturation of distinct cortical regions in 3-compared to 4-year-olds. The observed shift to more mature regions involved in processing syntactically complex sentences may underlie behavioral milestones in syntax acquisition at around 4 years.
Adult second language (L2) learning is a challenging enterprise inducing neuroplastic changes in ... more Adult second language (L2) learning is a challenging enterprise inducing neuroplastic changes in the human brain. However, it remains unclear how the structural language connectome and its subnetworks change during adult L2-learning. The current study investigated longitudinal changes in white matter (WM) language networks in each hemisphere, as well as their interconnection, in a large group of Arabic-speaking adults who learned German intensively for six months. We found a significant increase in WM-connectivity within bilateral temporal-parietal semantic and phonological subnetworks and right temporal-frontal pathways mainly in the second half of the learning period. At the same time, WM-connectivity between the two hemispheres decreased significantly. Crucially, these changes in WM-connectivity are correlated with L2 performance. The observed changes in subnetworks of the two hemispheres suggest a network reconfiguration due to lexical learning. The reduced interhemispheric conn...
Within the first years of life, children learn major aspects of their native language. However, t... more Within the first years of life, children learn major aspects of their native language. However, the ability to process complex sentence structures, a core faculty in human language called syntax, has been found to emerge only slowly. A milestone in the acquisition of syntax is reached around the age of 4, when children learn a variety of syntactic concepts, including, for example, subordinate clauses. Here, we ask which maturational changes in the child’s brain underlie the emergence of syntactic abilities around this critical age. We relate markers of cortical brain maturation to 3- and 4-year-olds’ syntactic in contrast to other language abilities. Our results show that distinct cortical brain areas support syntax in the two age groups: While 3-year-old children’s syntactic abilities were associated with increased surface area in the most posterior part of the left superior temporal sulcus, 4-year-old children showed an association with cortical thickness in the left posterior par...
The world’s languages differ substantially in their sounds, grammatical rules, and expression of ... more The world’s languages differ substantially in their sounds, grammatical rules, and expression of semantic relations. While starting from a shared neural substrate, the developing brain must therefore have the plasticity to accommodate to the specific processing needs of each language. However, there is little research on how language-specific differences impacts brain function and structure. Here, we show that speaking typologically different languages leaves unique traces in the brain’s white matter connections of monolingual speakers of English (fixed word order language), German (with grammatical marking), and Chinese (tonal language). Using machine learning, we classified with high accuracy the mother tongue based on the participants’ patterns of structural connectivity obtained with probabilistic tractography. More importantly, connectivity differences between groups could be traced back to relevant processing characteristics of each native tongue. Our results show that the lif...
The study of brain structure and change in neuroscience is commonly conducted using macroscopic m... more The study of brain structure and change in neuroscience is commonly conducted using macroscopic morphological measures of the brain such as regional volume or cortical thickness, providing little insight into the microstructure and physiology of the brain. In contrast, quantitative MRI allows the monitoring of microscopic brain change non-invasively in-vivo, and provides normative values for comparisons between tissues, regions, and individuals. To support the development and common use of qMRI for cognitive neuroscience, we analysed a set of qMRI metrics (R1, R2*, Magnetization Transfer saturation, Proton Density saturation, Fractional Anisotropy, Mean Diffusivity) in 101 healthy young adults. Here we provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of these metrics and their linear relationships to each other in grey and white matter to develop a more complete understanding of the relationship to tissue microstructure. Furthermore, we provide evidence that combinations of metrics may ...
SNL 2020 - 12th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Oct 21, 2020
13th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL), Oct 5, 2021
Human Brain Mapping, 2021
Grammar is central to any natural language. In the past decades, the artificial grammar of the An... more Grammar is central to any natural language. In the past decades, the artificial grammar of the AnBn type in which a pair of associated elements can be nested in the other pair was considered as a desirable model to mimic human language syntax without semantic interference. However, such a grammar relies on mere associating mechanisms, thus insufficient to reflect the hierarchical nature of human syntax. Here, we test how the brain imposes syntactic hierarchies according to the category relations on linearized sequences by designing a novel artificial “Hierarchical syntactic structure‐building Grammar” (HG), and compare this to the AnBn grammar as a “Nested associating Grammar” (NG) based on multilevel associations. Thirty‐six healthy German native speakers were randomly assigned to one of the two grammars. Both groups performed a grammaticality judgment task on auditorily presented word sequences generated by the corresponding grammar in the scanner after a successful explicit behav...
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Papers by Angela D Friederici