Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke.
Publication/Presentation Date
10-18-2022
Abstract
The mature human brain is lateralized for language, with the left hemisphere (LH) primarily responsible for sentence processing and the right hemisphere (RH) primarily responsible for processing suprasegmental aspects of language such as vocal emotion. However, it has long been hypothesized that in early life there is plasticity for language, allowing young children to acquire language in other cortical regions when LH areas are damaged. If true, what are the constraints on functional reorganization? Which areas of the brain can acquire language, and what happens to the functions these regions ordinarily perform? We address these questions by examining long-term outcomes in adolescents and young adults who, as infants, had a perinatal arterial ischemic stroke to the LH areas ordinarily subserving sentence processing. We compared them with their healthy age-matched siblings. All participants were tested on a battery of behavioral and functional imaging tasks. While stroke participants were impaired in some nonlinguistic cognitive abilities, their processing of sentences and of vocal emotion was normal and equal to that of their healthy siblings. In almost all, these abilities have both developed in the healthy RH. Our results provide insights into the remarkable ability of the young brain to reorganize language. Reorganization is highly constrained, with sentence processing almost always in the RH frontotemporal regions homotopic to their location in the healthy brain. This activation is somewhat segregated from RH emotion processing, suggesting that the two functions perform best when each has its own neural territory.
Volume
119
Issue
42
First Page
2207293119
Last Page
2207293119
ISSN
1091-6490
Published In/Presented At
Newport, E. L., Seydell-Greenwald, A., Landau, B., Turkeltaub, P. E., Chambers, C. E., Martin, K. C., Rennert, R., Giannetti, M., Dromerick, A. W., Ichord, R. N., Carpenter, J. L., Berl, M. M., & Gaillard, W. D. (2022). Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(42), e2207293119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207293119
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences | Pediatrics
PubMedID
36215488
Department(s)
Department of Pediatrics
Document Type
Article