Beyond the “30 Million Word Gap:” Children’s Conversational Exposure is Associated with Language-Related Brain Function

By Rachel R. Romeo, Julia A. Leonard, Sydney T. Robinson, Martin R. West, Allyson Mackey, Meredith Rowe, John D. E. Gabrieli. Psychology Science, 2018

649 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Children’s early language exposure impacts their later linguistic skills, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement, and large disparities in language exposure are associated with family socioeconomic status (SES). However, there is little evidence about the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between language experience and linguistic and cognitive development. Here, language experience was measured from home audio recordings of 36 SES-diverse 4- to 6-year-old children. During a story-listening functional MRI task, children who had experienced more conversational turns with adults—independently of SES, IQ, and adult-child utterances alone—exhibited greater left inferior frontal (Broca’s area) activation, which significantly explained the relation between children’s language exposure and verbal skill. This is the first evidence directly relating children’s language environments with neural language processing, specifying both an environmental and a neural mechanism underlying SES disparities in children’s language skills. Furthermore, results suggest that conversational experience impacts neural language processing over and above SES or the sheer quantity of words heard.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49aa3e9ea0d68358d63d114b7909ce550c4e3558

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Linda Darling-Hammond
2. Christina R. Krone
3. M. Immordino‐Yang
4. Evan Kidd
5. F. Korthagen

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. M. Immordino‐Yang
2. Linda Darling-Hammond
3. Evan Kidd

Citations in the corpus

• The relationship between symbolic play and language acquisition: A meta-analytic review (2018, background): “…and functional play, and found that symbolic play contained significantly greater proportion of questions and conversational turns in comparison to functional play, both of which have been shown to predict language development (Romeo, 2018; Rowe, Leech, & Cabrera, 2016; Romeo et al., 2018).”
• Nurturing Nature: How Brain Development Is Inherently Social and Emotional, and What This Means for Education (2019, background): “Infants need stable relationships with emotionally healthy, attentive care-givers (Tronick, 1989); adequate nutrition and physical care; and plentiful exposure to language (Romeo et al., 2018; Shonkoff et al., 2012).”