Year: 2022
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The mature human brain is lateralized for language, with the left hemisphere (LH) primarily responsible for sentence processing and the right hemisphere (RH) primarily responsible for processing suprasegmental aspects of language such as vocal emotion. However, it has long been hypothesized that in early life there is plasticity for language, allowing young children to acquire language in other cortical regions when LH areas are damaged. If true, what are the constraints on functional reorganization? Which areas of the brain can acquire language, and what happens to the functions these regions ordinarily perform? We address these questions by examining long-term outcomes in adolescents and young adults who, as infants, had a perinatal arterial ischemic stroke to the LH areas ordinarily subserving sentence processing. We compared them with their healthy age-matched siblings. All participants were tested on a battery of behavioral and functional imaging tasks. While stroke participants were impaired in some nonlinguistic cognitive abilities, their processing of sentences and of vocal emotion was normal and equal to that of their healthy siblings. In almost all, these abilities have both developed in the healthy RH. Our results provide insights into the remarkable ability of the young brain to reorganize language. Reorganization is highly constrained, with sentence processing almost always in the RH frontotemporal regions homotopic to their location in the healthy brain. This activation is somewhat segregated from RH emotion processing, suggesting that the two functions perform best when each has its own neural territory.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: American Heart Association, Georgetown University, Children's National Hospital, National Institutes of Health, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Awards: Cognitive Impairment Moderated by Working Memory in Pediatric Partial Epilepsy, G1525567484, Language and cognition after perinatal stroke, G3217979391, Language, neural reorganization, and functional outcomes after perinatal stroke, Language development and linguistic processing after left hemisphere perinatal stroke, G6831407956, District of Columbia Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (DC-IDDRC), Neural Injury & Plasticity
OpenAlex ID: W4304098014