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Domain general cognitive control brain networks are associated with the development of children's language abilities
Poster A103 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Xiaohong Yang1, Zihang Zhou; 1Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China
The processing of language is a crucial aspect of complex cognitive functioning in humans. In research on adults, it has been found that this process is mainly supported by a left-lateralized language specific network, distributed across frontal and temporal lobes, with less dependence on brain networks related to domain-general cognitive control (Diachek, Blank, Siegelman, Affourtit, & Fedorenko, 2020). However, could this finding be applicable to children and adolescents? As they may have inferior language skills compared to adults, could they be more reliant on domain-general brain networks? To address this question, in this study, we investigated the developmental patterns and associations between cortical morphology and language abilities in children and school-aged adolescents. We used data from 236 subjects（age=6-18）in the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) . This project was established to create normative charts for brain structure and function across the human lifespan, and link age-related changes in brain imaging measures to psychological assessments of behavior, cognition, and emotion using an accelerated longitudinal design (Liu et al., 2021). To assess language ability, we used the verbal processing scores derived from two subtests, namely vocabulary and comprehension, extracted from the Chinese version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Full Scale, Fourth Edition. Gray matter volume of brain regions was used as an indicator of brain morphology. Based on the networks proposed in Schaefer et al. (2018), we obtained the masks of the language network and the domain-general cognitive control network (defined as the combination of the fronto-parietal network and dorsal attention network). Gray matter volumes of these networks were used as an indicators of brain morphology. Generalized additive mixed models were used to analyze the data. Results showed that in children and adolescents, language ability scores were significantly correlated with the gray matter volumes in both the language network and the domain-general cognitive control brain network, suggesting that these two kinds of networks work in conjunction to facilitate the development of language ability.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,