Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Process Spoken Sentences, Unlike Adults

InfoSheet

Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m more left-brained”, or that “I’m more right-brained”? They might have been picturing something like this in their minds:

In actual fact, our brains don’t work this way. Evidence from brain imaging has shown time and time again that we cannot be categorically defined as left or right brain dominant (Nielson et. al., 2013). Instead, what has been observed was that certain tasks were performed in certain brain hemispheres. For example, whether we see ourselves as creative or logical, most of us process sentence structures in the left hemisphere. For patients with damage to this region, they struggle to form sentences. This is a condition known as Broca’s Aphasia.

Recent research published in 2020 by Georgetown neurology professor, Elissa L. Newport, found that infants and young children possess a superpower of sorts. And that is that they use BOTH their right and left hemispheres to process spoken sentences and their emotional affect. And this goes on until they’re about 10 or 11! This is because localisation of brain processes doesn’t happen until about age 10 or 11.

Examples of individual activation maps in each of the age groups. Strong activation in right-hemisphere homologs of the left-hemisphere language areas is evident in the youngest children, declines over age, and is entirely absent in most adults. Image is credited to Elissa Newport. Source: Neurosciencenews (original article).

What this means is, unlike adults, if young children were to experience a neural injury, it might not necessarily mean a handicap for language learning and processing. Because they are able to use both hemispheres interchangeably, the undamaged hemisphere may compensate for the other.

This blogpost was written by our intern Raye Fion and edited by our lab manager Fei Ting.

Original article:

Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults – Neuroscience News. (2021). Retrieved 15 June 2021, from https://neurosciencenews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/neurosciencenews.com/language-hemispheres-children-16983/amp/?amp_js_v=a3&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQFKAGwASA%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fneuroscienc

Other references:

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PloS one, 8(8), e71275. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071275