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The cognitive neural mechanisms and age-related development of taxonomic and thematic relations processing: A resting-state fMRI study
Poster Session D, Saturday, October 26, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Jinfeng Ding1,2, Panpan Liang1,2, Xiaohong Yang3; 1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China, 2Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 3Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Concepts interconnect via various semantic relations within the conceptual semantic system, among which taxonomic and thematic relations are crucial. Taxonomic relations are established based on the similar features between concepts, and thematic relations are constructed on the basis of the co-occurrence of concepts in the same events or scenarios. Research shows that as age increases, the semantic system dynamically changes, which is reflected by different developmental trends of various semantic relations. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of the taxonomic and thematic relations processing in children and adolescents remain underexplored. The current study aimed to explore this issue by performing a seed-based connectivity analysis of resting-state fMRI. We collected behavioral and resting-state brain imaging data from 215 subjects aged 6-18 years. Participants performed a lexical decision task with the target words being primed by taxonomically related, taxonomically unrelated, thematically related and thematically unrelated words. Three brain regions, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), anterior temporal lobe (ATL), and angular gyrus (AG), closely related to language processing, were selected as seed sites for the study. The behavioral results revealed taxonomic and thematic priming effects, as indicated by the shorter reaction time and higher accuracy for the target words preceded by taxonomically and thematically related words relative to the unrelated words. Combining the behavioral data with the resting-state fMRI data, we found a significant interaction between taxonomic relation and age, which was manifested in the functional connectivity between the ATL and the lateral occipital lobes bilaterally, and the functional connectivity between the IFG and the right posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) and posterior inferior temporal gyrus (pITG). Further analysis revealed that in the age group of 6-9 years the better the taxonomic priming effect the stronger the functional connectivity, whereas in the age group of 10-18 years the better the taxonomic priming effect, the weaker the functional connectivity. An overlapping analysis of the obtained brain areas over seven major brain networks found that they mainly belong to the frontoparietal control network. In summary, we found that the cognitive neural mechanisms of taxonomic relation and thematic relation processing will change with individual development, mainly manifested in the change of the functional connectivity strength between cognitive control brain regions and language processing brain regions. Semantic processing is more dependent on the interaction between the control network and language network in childhood, and this dependence gradually diminishes as the semantic system matures with age.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Meaning: Lexical Semantics