Purpose: We aimed to develop a noninvasive neural test of language comprehension to use with nonspeaking children for whom standard behavioral testing is unreliable (e.g., minimally verbal autism). Our aims were threefold. First, we sought to establish the sensitivity of two auditory paradigms to elicit neural responses in individual neurotypical…

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform worse than controls when listening to speech in a temporally modulated noise (Alcantara, Weisblatt, Moore, & Bolton, 2004; Groen et al., 2009). The current study examined whether this is due to poor auditory temporal-envelope processing. Temporal modulation transfer functions were measured in…

One of the most challenging tasks in neuroscience in language studies, is investigation of the brain's ability to integrate and process information. This task can only be successfully addressed by applying various assessment techniques integrated into a multimodal approach. Each of these techniques has its advantages and disadvantages, but help to…

Investigating the neuronal network underlying language processing may contribute to a better understanding of how the brain masters this complex cognitive function with surprising ease and how language is acquired at a fast pace in infancy. Modern neuroimaging methods permit to visualize the evolvement and the function of the language network. The…

Learning to associate auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is a first and critical step for becoming a skilled reader in alphabetic languages. Nevertheless, it remains largely unknown which brain areas subserve the learning and automation of such associations. Here, we employ functional magnetic resonance…

Word segmentation, detecting word boundaries in continuous speech, is a fundamental aspect of language learning that can occur solely by the computation of statistical and speech cues. Fifty-four children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to three streams of concatenated syllables that contained either high…

The current study investigated the neurobiological role of white matter in visuospatial versus linguistic processing abilities in autism using diffusion tensor imaging. We examined differences in white matter integrity between high-functioning children with autism (HFA) and typically developing controls (CTRL), in relation to the groups' response…

Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9-15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in…

Two studies evaluated the interhemispheric transmission deficit explanation of reading disability by comparing second- and sixth-grade normal and poor readers on learning and discrimination tasks involving hemispheric presentations of visual stimuli. Results suggested verbal processing rather than interhemispheric transmission as a cause of group…

Left versus right hemispheric auditory-verbal processing ability was studied in 28 learning-disabled children and adolescents, by measuring the influence on reaction time of the hand used to respond versus the hemisphere stimulated. The LD children did not develop the ability to suppress right hemisphere linguistic processes as a function of age.…