Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the process of language specialization in the brain by comparing developmental changes in two contrastive orthographies: Chinese and English. In a visual word rhyming judgment task, we found a significant interaction between age and language in left inferior parietal lobule and left…

How does the brain's response to speech change over the first months of life? Although behavioral findings indicate that neonates' listening biases are sharpened over the first months of life, with a species-specific preference for speech emerging by 3 months, the neural substrates underlying this developmental change are unknown. We…

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans were obtained from 19 infants at 7 months. Expressive and receptive language performance was assessed at 12 months. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) identified brain regions where gray-matter and white-matter concentrations at 7 months correlated significantly with children's language scores at 12 months.…

In this paper, in contrast to previous neuroimaging literature reviews on first language (L1) and second language (L2), the focus was only on neuroimaging studies that were directly conducted on multilingual participants. In total, 14 neuroimaging studies were included in our study such as 10 functional magnetic resonance imaging, 1 positron…

Speech scientists have long proposed that formant exaggeration in infant-directed speech plays an important role in language acquisition. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated neural coding of formant-exaggerated speech in 6-12-month-old infants. Two synthetic /i/ vowels were presented in alternating blocks to test the effects of…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4-6 months, older 10-12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic…

The construction of boys as a gendered culture is not usually associated with neuroscience. Exceptions are publications and presentations by consultants on boys' education who adopt a "brain-based" perspective. From a neuroscience perspective, my analysis indicates the selective use of primary neuroscience research to construct and perpetuate…

Language and arithmetic are both lateralized to the left hemisphere in the majority of right-handed adults. Yet, does this similar lateralization reflect a single overall constraint of brain organization, such an overall "dominance" of the left hemisphere for all linguistic and symbolic operations? Is it related to the lateralization of specific…

This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4-6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs…

It is generally accepted that the presence of a second language (L2) has an impact on the neuronal substrates build up and used for language processing; the influence of the age of L2 exposure, however, is not established. We tested the hypothesis that the age of L2 acquisition has an effect on the cortical representation of a multilingual…

Research over the past several decades has provided insight into the processes that govern early brain development and how those processes contribute to behavior. In this article, the authors provide an overview of early brain development beginning with a summary of the prenatal period. They then turn to postnatal development and examine how brain…

The dissertation presents a theory of semantics and pragmatics for both language and vision. I focus on sentences including proper names, descriptions, and attitude report verbs, and on the Necker cube. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the semantic contribution of visual…