Toddler brain scan gives language insight

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Toddler brain scan gives language insight

By Helen Briggs

BBC News

The brain has a critical window for language development between the
ages of two and four, brain scans suggest.
Environmental influences have their biggest impact before the age of
four, as the brain's wiring develops to process new words, say UK and US
scientists.
The research in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests disorders
causing language delay should be tackled early.
It also explains why young children are good at learning two
languages.
The scientists, based at King's College London, and Brown
University, Rhode Island, studied 108 children with normal brain
development between the ages of one and six.
They used brain scans to look at myelin - the insulation that
develops from birth within the circuitry of the brain.
To their surprise, they found the distribution of myelin is fixed
from the age of four, suggesting the brain is most plastic in very early
life.
Any environmental influences on brain development will be strongest
in infanthood, they predict.
This explains why immersing children in a bilingual environment
before the age of four gives them the best chance of becoming fluent in
both languages, the research suggests.
It also suggests that there is a critical time during development
when environmental influence on cognitive skills may be greatest.
Dr Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, from King's College London, led the
study.
He told the BBC: "Since our work seems to indicate that brain
circuits associated with language are more flexible before the age of
four, early intervention for children with delayed language attainment
should be initiated before this critical age.
"This may be relevant to many developmental disorders, such as
autism, since delayed language is a common early trait."

Growing vocabulary

Early childhood is a time when language skills develop very rapidly.
Babies have a vocabulary of up to 50 words at 12 months but by the
age of six this has expanded to about 5,000 words.
Language skills are localised in the frontal areas of the left-hand
side of the brain.
The researchers therefore expected more myelin to develop in the
left-hand side of the brain, as the children learned more language.
In fact, they found it remained constant, but had a stronger
influence on language ability before the age of four, suggesting there
is a crucial window for interventions in developmental disorders.
"This work is important as it is the first to investigate the
relationship between brain structure and language across early childhood
and demonstrate how this relationship changes with age," said Dr Sean
Deoni from Brown University, a co-researcher on the study.
"This is important since language is commonly altered or delayed in
many developmental disorders, such as autism."
Commenting on the study, Prof Dorothy Bishop of the department of
Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford said the
research added important new information about early development of
connections in brain regions important for cognitive functions.
"There is suggestive evidence of links with language development but
it is too early to be confident about functional implications of the
findings," she said.
"Ideally we would need a longitudinal study following children over
time to track how structural brain changes relate to language function."
The study was funded by the National Institutes for Mental Health
(US) and the Wellcome Trust (UK).


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24446292
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