Poster D26, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Developmental changes in the inferior frontal cortex for processing Chinese classifiers
Shu-Hui Lee1, Chi-Lin Yu1, Chuan-Ching Liao2, Ting Chen2;1National Tsing Hua University, 2National Taiwan University
Reading ability is associated with maturational changes in the brain, which in turn is essential for functioning in our daily life (Johnson, 2011). Despite the fact that the specialization of the language network is well established in alphabetical languages (Brauer & Friederici, 2007), we do not know whether these findings can be generalized to Chinese, especially for children. We attempted to study violations in Chinese classifiers, a relatively constrained phrase structure. By adopting this classifier violation paradigm, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to clarify the neural correlates of processing phrasal level of semantics. Forty-six typically developing children (aged 7-15, 27 females) were asked to perform semantic congruency judgments on congruent, intra-classifier (IA) violated, and inter-classifier (IE) violated phrases. The IA and IE violations involved changing a correct classifier to an incorrect classifier of the same category (e.g. count-count or mass-mass) and of a different category (e.g. count-mass or mass-count), respectively. The comparison of the IE violation vs. the IA violation produced greater activation in the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and left inferior frontal gyrus for both age groups. Moreover, greater activation was found in the IFG for the adolescents (aged 11-15) compared to the children (aged 7-10) on the contrast of [IE vs. IA]. Left IFG is proposed to be specialized for selecting relevant semantic information. All together, these results suggest that older children may have better executive control in selecting the appropriate classifier for the phrasal structure, resulting greater activation in the left IFG.
Themes: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Development
Method: Functional Imaging