The left brain is activated from the birth of speech
Contact: Roxanne Moster roxannemsupport.ucla.edu 310-794-2264 University of California - Los Angeles for the first time researchers have used images magnectic resonance functional imaging (fMRI) to study infantbrain activity in response to speech. They found that almost from birth, the left hemisphere of the brain plays an important role in the treatment of language functions. Presented second December in the 89th Annual Scientific Conference and General Assembly of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), these preliminary results challenge the earlier belief that the left hemisphere dominance develop fully until puberty.lateralization of language seems to be fixed almost from birth, says Shantanu Sinha, associate professor of radiology at the David Geffen School
of Medicine at UCLA, where the study is in progress. Lateralization is the activation of a function, such as language, the right or left side of the brain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time fMRI has been used to study children, said Sinha. With fMRI, we can non-invasively investigate the neuronal response of infants to stimuli of various kinds, without ionizing radiation or pharmaceutical injenctions.As part of a larger longitudinal study monitoring the cognitive development of children with brain injuries from birth to 2 years, led the researchers MRI examinations of 42 children with documented brain injury. Functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis includes only cases in which both were parts of the brain develop equally able and excluded children
with obvious brain injury on MR images. The children were asleep but not sedated during the procedure. During fMRI, the children were listening through headphones to tapes consisting of scanner noise, nonsense speech, and maternal speech.The experiments are not sensitive enough to determine if the brains of children were able to distinguish between two types of speech.However, the final pattern of activation
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