Background

This study investigated the experience of early language exposure and has come across the diversity of social-economic status that can influence more robust white matter connectivity within the left arcuate and Broca’s area upon the development of the brain.¹ Their research of this study is essential in knowing how the variation of early childhood learning impacts the development of the brain in neuroanatomy and behavior.

Other researches that have been conducted relating to brain development with the experience of language previously higher-income backgrounds have shown a greater volume of gray matter than the student with lower-income background although the cortical white matter volume did not vary between the two groups.² Children in their young stages are known to have the ability to soak up information. Language is like an instrument of collective thoughts children absorb language when spoken to and imitates what they hear to make similar sounds.³  

Methods

In this study there were forty native English speaking children from prekindergarten to kindergarten that were evaluated along with their parents. Results represent the first evidence that cortical thickness differs across the brain between higher- and lower-income students, and that cortical thickness is related to academic achievement test scores. Correlations were tested across all white matter tracts and found to be no significance in any are besides the left arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculus. 

Overall the data related to the first evidence of a direct association between children’s language experience, adult-child conversational turns, and specific neuroanatomical structural areas, was analyzed across all white matter tracts but no significant correlation with any tracts except for the left arcuate and the left superior longitudinal fasciculus. The results of the study supported the claim and the development of dorsal language tracts was environmentally influenced, specifically by early dialogic interaction.¹ 

Discussion

This study is significant because it shows how more conversational turns are linked to consistent white matter connectivity independent of socioeconomic status; therefore, language abilities influence structural brain development. Children who grow up in between learning their native language and a second language would have the brain’s ability to impact the structural development. Further studies that can be done are children with more than one language or even a broader study of nonverbal cognition. There were a couple of conflicts within the study that occurred when recruited a sample of children from socioeconomically diverse that did not complete data some data. 

[+] References

[+] Other Work By Aisha El-Hoot