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    • br Methods br Results br

    2018-11-14


    Methods
    Results
    Discussion The plurals-in-compounds effect has received considerable attention in the psycholinguistic literature and has played a crucial role in more general debates in cognitive science concerning the role of grammar in language processing and development (e.g., McClelland and Patterson, 2002; Pinker and Ullman, 2002). The current study reports the first ERP production study of the plurals-in-compounds effect in 8- to 12-year-old children in comparison to adults. We found that the brains of both children and adults appear to honour the subtle linguistic constraints that govern the distribution of compound-internal modifiers. Specifically, the constraint against regular plurals inside lexical compounds was signalled by an enhanced negativity for the (silent) production of compounds from regular (compared to irregular) plural forms as non-heads. This negativity was found for both adults and for children across the age range tested. The behavioural results also seemed parallel for the two groups, indicating that 8- to 12-year-olds are sensitive to the constraint in the same way as adults, though interaction effects might have been masked by ceiling effects observed for adults. We also observed a number of developmental changes, particularly in the EEG data. Firstly, children\'s electrophysiological markers were considerably delayed (by ∼450ms relative to adults). Secondly, the negativity was fronto-centrally distributed (and slightly more right-lateralized) for adults, but had a much broader distribution for children.
    Conclusion
    Conflict of interest
    Acknowledgements This project has been supported by a grant to H.C. and C.B. from the Leverhulme Trust (F/00213/U) and an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship to H.C. We are grateful to all participants and the schools that allowed us to collect data from their students. We also thank Roger Deeble for technical support and Anna Jessen for help with statistical analyses in R.
    Introduction Over the past years a large body of evidence has demonstrated that the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) of adults is modulated by numerical magnitudes (i.e., the number of items within a set) conveyed by numerical symbols (for reviews see: Ansari, 2008; Dehaene et al., 2003). For instance, modulation of cyclobenzaprine hydrochloride activation in the IPS has been observed in tasks in which participants are asked to choose the larger or smaller of two presented numerals (e.g., Ansari et al., 2005; Holloway et al., 2010; Pinel et al., 1999, 2001). Significant brain activation in the IPS has also been reported in tasks in which symbolic numerical magnitudes are manipulated in the context of calculation—such as mentally subtracting a single digit from a fixed reference number (e.g., Simon et al., 2004, 2002). Moreover, recent evidence has demonstrated that the IPS is engaged in tasks in which adults are asked to estimate the spatial position of a given number on a physical number line (i.e., number line estimation; Vogel et al., 2013), as well as in fMRI-adaptation in which neural signal recovery effects have been demonstrated in response to the presentation of numerical deviants (Holloway et al., 2012; Notebaert et al., 2011). Together, the current evidence from neuroimaging studies in adults suggests that the IPS represents the semantic meaning conveyed by numerical symbols. Additional evidence for the crucial role of the IPS is provided by studies that have demonstrated a relationship between individual differences of brain activation in the IPS and numerical abilities in children (e.g., Bugden et al., 2012; Emerson and Cantlon, 2014). As well, studies with patients have shown that brain damage – also artificially induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – to the parietal lobe impairs numerical abilities (e.g., Cipolotti et al., 1991; Cipolotti and Butterworth, 1995; Kadosh et al., 2007). Although these studies have revealed important insights into the neural correlates of symbolic numerical magnitude representation in the adult brain, a precise understanding of how the human brain represents symbolic numerical magnitude over developmental time is largely missing. The sparse number of existing developmental imaging studies converge to suggest an ontogenetic reorganization of the functional neuroanatomy underlying symbolic number processing, whereby a shift occurs from an early engagement of prefrontal regions in children to a greater reliance on parietal regions (especially the IPS) in adults (Ansari and Dhital, 2006; Ansari et al., 2005; Holloway and Ansari, 2010; Kaufmann et al., 2006). Commonly this finding is interpreted to indicate an age-related increase in efficiency with which symbolic numerical magnitudes are processed in the brain, whereby the mapping (i.e., the associative connection) between initially arbitrary shapes of numerical symbols and their semantic meaning (i.e., numerical magnitude) is strengthened, while the decrease in prefrontal activation is explained by a reduced reliance on resources supporting the processing of initially weak representation of symbolic numerical magnitude in children.