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BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / PSYCHOLOGY
Functional organization of perisylvian activation during presentation of sentences in preverbal infants
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*Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, U562, and ||Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, 4 Place du Général Leclerc, 91400 Orsay, France; Neurologie Pédiatrique, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Kremlin Bicêtre, and ¶Radiologie Pédiatrique, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Necker-Enfants Malades, Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris, 75015 Paris, France; **Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, U663, Université Paris 5, 75015 Paris, France; Collège de France, 75005 Paris, France; and Institut Fédératif de Recherche 49, 91400 Orsay, France
Communicated by Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, July 27, 2006 (received for review June 10, 2006)
We examined the functional organization of cerebral activity in 3-month-old infants when they were listening to their mother language. Short sentences were presented in a slow event-related functional MRI paradigm. We then parsed the infant's network of perisylvian responsive regions into functionally distinct regions based on their speed of activation and sensitivity to sentence repetition. An adult-like structure of functional MRI response delays was observed along the superior temporal regions, suggesting a hierarchical processing scheme. The fastest responses were recorded in the vicinity of Heschl's gyrus, whereas responses became increasingly slower toward the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus and toward the temporal poles and inferior frontal regions (Broca's area). Activation in the latter region increased when the sentence was repeated after a 14-s delay, suggesting the early involvement of Broca's area in verbal memory. The fact that Broca's area is active in infants before the babbling stage implies that activity in this region is not the consequence of sophisticated motor learning but, on the contrary, that this region may drive, through interactions with the perceptual system, the learning of the complex motor sequences required for future speech production. Our results point to a complex, hierarchical organization of the human brain in the first months of life, which may play a crucial role in language acquisition in our species.
functional MRI | language | brain | memory | child
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Data deposition: The neuroimaging data have been deposited with the fMRI Data Center, www.fmridc.org (accession no. 2-2006-1228W).
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ghislaine.dehaene{at}cea.fr
© 2006 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
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