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The Relationship Between Brain Structure and Function During Novel Grammar Learning Across Development
Poster Session B, Friday, October 25, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
Nina K. Wyman1,2, Merel E.E. Koning1, Willeke M. Menks1,4, Clara Ekerdt1, Guillén Fernández1, Evan Kidd4,5,6, Kristin Lemhöfer1, James M. McQueen1,4, Gabriele Janzen3,4; 1Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University and Radboud University Medical Center, 2Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 3Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, 4Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, 5ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, 6School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, Australian National University
Age is an important factor for second language learning success. When people start learning a second language in early childhood the path towards proficiency is typically easier and more successful. Though, the ability to master some components of a second language, such as grammar declines with age. The exact timing of this decline in language learning abilities remains uncertain, however it seems to occur between childhood and adolescence. To uncover the neural mechanisms responsible for this developmental shift a recent large scale fMRI study by Menks et al. (2024) explored the effect of age on grammar learning ability and its neural underpinnings. In that study, 165 Dutch-speaking individuals (8–25 years) implicitly learned Icelandic morphosyntactic rules and performed a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) in the MRI scanner. Behaviorally, GJT performance increased steadily from 8 to 15.4 years, after which age had no further effect. Neurally, this age-related GJT performance was related to differential activation levels in working-memory and grammar-related brain areas. The current study follows up on those results by exploring the structural brain data collected during that study (N = 159). We use voxel-based morphometry and regression analyses to investigate changes in gray matter structure across development related to novel grammar learning. Our results show that cortical gray matter volume and cortical thickness were negatively related to age, consistent with the developmental literature. Hippocampal volume was positively related to age-related GJT performance and L2 (English) vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, GJT performance, L2 grammar proficiency and L2 vocabulary knowledge were positively related to gray matter maturation within parietal regions. This structural result were compared to the functional results reported by Menks et al. (2024), which show the parietal regions overlapping with the fMRI clusters that showed increased brain activation in relation to grammar learning. Thus, by combining results from different imaging modalities collected from a large developmental sample we found that age-related change in language learning ability is associated with gray matter changes and brain activation in parietal regions, which may suggest that brain maturation in the parietal lobes plays an important role in second language learning, and novel grammar learning specifically.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,