Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 98, April 2017, Pages 1-3
Neuropsychologia

Editorial
The neural basis of language learning: Brief introduction to the special issue

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.03.019Get rights and content

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Development

To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences by categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Brusini et al. show how, as early as 18 months of age, toddlers are able to build accurate syntactic category expectations. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record event-related potentials (ERPs) in 18-month-olds while they listened to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in their native French that contained an ambiguous function

Reading: the effects of learning different orthographies

The impact of literacy acquisition on brain structure and function has been explored in previous studies. Here, Jasinska et al. examined how learning to read in more than one language can change neural activity patterns depending on the regularity of orthographic-to-phonological correspondences. They compared Spanish-English and French-English bilingual children aged between 6 and 10 years with English monolinguals. Spanish is transparent with respect to orthographic-phonological

Learning new words: insights from artificial language learning and modelling

In the first of this series of papers on novel-word learning, the processes of first extracting the word form from the speech signal and then associating it with meaning were explored by Francois et al. using EEG. Adult participants heard auditory streams of trisyllabic words either with a visual stimulus (word-picture association) or without (segmentation). After learning, the participants listened to the same stimuli but were tested for implicit detection of online mismatches (either

Learning a new language in adulthood: memory systems and individual differences

Bartolotti et al. used fMRI to explore the first stage of second-language acquisition and cross-linguistic interference in monolingual adults. Newly learned Spanish words evoked activity in the hippocampus in English speaking monolinguals, and this activity was modulated by the presence of an English competitor that shared phonology with the Spanish target word. This finding is consistent with the idea that new vocabulary acquisition in a second language depends on the medial temporal lobe or

Exploring neuroplasticity in speech and language learning: new methods, expertise and age-of-acquisition effects

In this last section, Carey & McGettigan review the implementation and promise of real-time MRI of the vocal tract to examine phonetic learning. They demonstrate how this can be used in combination with brain fMRI to examine vocal imitation and learning in adult learners. These methods offer new insights into speech learning, and have application for understanding clinical conditions, foreign language acquisition in adults relative to children, and phonetic talent or expertise.

Expertise in

Final thoughts for this special issue

Language learning changes the brain, and such learning can occur throughout the lifespan. The evidence seems to indicate that learning occurs differently in early life and that the concomitant brain changes are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from those related to later learning. The studies featured in this special issue help to shed new light on how the brain is changed in terms of its shape and organization in association with many different language learning scenarios. We

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