TY - JOUR
T1 - Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke
AU - Newport, Elissa L.
AU - Seydell-Greenwald, Anna
AU - Landau, Barbara
AU - Turkeltaub, Peter E.
AU - Chambers, Catherine E.
AU - Martin, Kelly C.
AU - Rennert, Rebecca
AU - Giannetti, Margot
AU - Dromerick, Alexander W.
AU - Ichord, Rebecca N.
AU - Carpenter, Jessica L.
AU - Berl, Madison M.
AU - Gaillard, William D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
PY - 2022/10/18
Y1 - 2022/10/18
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - brain reorganization
KW - developmental plasticity
KW - language
KW - pediatric stroke
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.2207293119
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2207293119
M3 - Article
C2 - 36215488
AN - SCOPUS:85139512455
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 119
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 42
M1 - e2207293119
ER -