Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Jin Wang
Education
Identifying the Neural Basis of Phonological, Semantic, and Syntactic Processing in 18-to-36-month-old Awake Toddlers: A Passive-Listening fMRI Study.
Language comprehension requires integrating sound (phonology), meaning (semantics), and grammar (syntax), yet some children struggle to acquire it for unclear neurocognitive reasons. Studying toddlers between 18 and 36 months—a period of rapid vocabulary growth—offers a critical window into the mechanisms of language development and the early identification of developmental language disorders (DLD). Behavioral milestones are unreliable predictors: while children unable to produce 50 words or two-word combinations by 24 months are labeled “late talkers,” 50–70% eventually catch up. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides high-resolution data on the neural basis of language processing; however, toddlers are notoriously difficult to scan using traditional active tasks. Few existing toddler fMRI studies have only examined responses to whole sentences or narratives, leaving open how the brain processes distinct linguistic components and how neural specialization emerges. This project will address this gap by developing child-friendly, passive-listening block paradigms that separately assess brain responses to phonological, semantic, and syntactic information. In addition, a naturalistic listening paradigm combined with large language models (LLMs) will be tested to determine its validity in identifying brain regions encoding distinct linguistic features. This project will identify effective fMRI approaches for studying the neurocognitive mechanisms for toddlers’ language processing and establish a baseline for a longitudinal project tracking language network development, ultimately informing early identification and education of children at risk for DLD.
