Age and experience shape developmental changes in the neural basis of language-related learning

Very little is known about the neural underpinnings of language learning across the lifespan and how these might be modified by maturational and experiential factors. Building on behavioral research highlighting the importance of early word segmentation (i.e. the detection of word boundaries in continuous speech) for subsequent language learning, here we characterize developmental changes in brain activity as this process occurs online, using data collected in a mixed cross-sectional and longitudinal design. One hundred and fifty-six participants, ranging from age 5 to adulthood, underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to three novel streams of continuous speech, which contained either strong statistical regularities, strong statistical regularities and speech cues, or weak statistical regularities providing minimal cues to word boundaries. All age groups displayed significant signal increases over time in temporal cortices for the streams with high statistical regularities; however, we observed a significant right-to-left shift in the laterality of these learning-related increases with age. Interestingly, only the 5- to 10-year-old children displayed significant signal increases for the stream with low statistical regularities, suggesting an age-related decrease in sensitivity to more subtle statistical cues. Further, in a sample of 78 10-year-olds, we examined the impact of proficiency in a second language and level of pubertal development on learning-related signal increases, showing that the brain regions involved in language learning are influenced by both experiential and maturational factors.     

Reciprocal teaching and self-monitoring of strategy use: effects on reading comprehension

Reciprocal teaching (RT) is an instructional procedure to teach students cognitive strategies that might lead to improved reading comprehension. However, self-monitoring (SM) strategy use can optimize instruction of comprehension. Thus, the present study analyzed: (a) the efficacy of RT in regular classes and (b) the efficacy of RT + SM of strategy use. A sample of 59 students in the fourth year of primary education was selected: 19 children were selected as an RT condition, 18 as an RT + SM condition, while the remaining 22 made up the comparison group. Two types of comprehension measures were used: tasks of specific effects (getting the main idea, writing a summary, comprehension-monitoring test) and transfer effect measures (standardised tests, word meaning inference, and free recall). Thus, the results show that both the RT condition and the RT + SM condition benefited from the instruction, performing better than the comparison group in measures of specific effects and in some of the transfer effect measures. This result shows that SM is not a necessary component in the instruction of reading comprehension with RT.