Although decades of research have established a relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s brain development, the specifics of this connection are not known. The so-called “word gap” — the influential finding from the early 1990s that school-age children who grew up in lower-SES households have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent classmates — and other evidence demonstrating an influence of early language exposure on later language ability suggests a potential influence of language experience on brain structure.<\/p>\n In their neuroimaging study of 40 four- to six-year-old children and their parents of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, Rachel Romeo and colleagues found that greater conversational turn-taking<\/strong> (measured over a weekend with an in-home audio recording device) was related to stronger connections between Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area<\/strong> — brain regions critical for the comprehension and production of speech<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Society for Neuroscience press release: Young children who are regularly engaged in conversation by adults may have stronger connections between two developing brain regions critical for language, according… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[368,6,9],"tags":[42,45,73,25,93,511],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27425,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27347\/revisions\/27425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/father-reading-to-child.jpg\")
Young children who are regularly engaged in conversation by adults may have stronger connections between two developing brain regions critical for language<\/strong>, according to a study of healthy young children that confirms a hypothesis registered with the Open Science Framework. This finding, published in\u00a0JNeurosci<\/em>, was independent of parental income and education, suggesting that talking with children from an early age could promote their language skills regardless of their socioeconomic status<\/strong>.<\/p>\n