How language and social status change the developing brain

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium How language and social status change the developing brain    Brain development is a highly complex process that is strongly influenced by the environment in which a child is raised, with the earliest years of life being especially important for the emergence of language and other cognitive abilities. The brain needs sensory experiences to grow properly, and the richness of a child’s surroundings is an important determinant of their neurodevelopmental trajectory. It is thought that language develops quickly in the first five years of life, but is much harder to acquire after this “critical period.” Research shows that young children who are exposed to high quality language and more child-directed speech will have larger vocabularies and better language processing skills later on. These and other studies clearly show that a child’s early environment and socioeconomic status (SES) impact how their language skills develop over time. Yet, we still know very little about precisely how these factors influence brain development.  An international research team led by Laia Fibla, now at Concordia University in Québec, has just published in the Journal of Neuroscience the very first study of how language environment and SES impact the development of the brain’s white matter tracts during the earliest years of life. White matter tracts are neural pathways that connect distant brain regions so that they can exchange signals with one another. This long-range cross-talk is facilitated by myelin, a fatty substance that insulates individual nerve fibers within the pathways, so that the electrical signals they carry travel faster. Language processing typically engages a number of areas distributed throughout the brain, and so depends on the white matter tracts between them.     Continued here

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