龚高浪老师邀请了德国马普脑认知研究所的Jens Brauer博士到实验室作报告，欢迎感兴趣的老师和同学去听。
报告时间： 9月16号（下周二）下午2:00 -3:00
报告地点：京师大厦9420会议室
Speaker: Dr. Jens Brauer
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
Title: Neurophysiology and Neuroanatomy of Language Development
Abstract: The progress of neuroimaging has paved the ground for a deeper knowledge of the neuronal basis of human cognitive functions. One of the major faculties that distinguishes human cognitive abilities is to process language in all its phonologic, semantic, and syntactic complexity. Neuroimaging has tremendously helped to understand how language processing is implemented in the human brain. In recent years our research has gained insight into the developmental changes in the brain that help to achieve increasing and finally mature language abilities. The progress in acquiring phonological, lexical, and syntactic knowledge during language development is complemented by functional and structural changes in the brain. Our research agenda is to describe these maturational changes and relate them to the increasing ability in language processing during development. Although young children very soon make use of the established network of language-relevant brain regions, particularly inferior frontal and superior temporal areas, these brain regions are recruited differently than identified in the adult brain and show specific properties. The developing language network of children is confined by specific functional network connectivity. Developmental specificities in functional processing are accompanied by differences in brain structure. The white matter fiber tracts that support information exchange between frontal and temporal language regions in the brain are immature in young children. This structural maturation in turn is reflected in functional recruitment of cortical areas. Taken together, the properties of the developing brain suggest that language development is fundamentally connected to concurrent maturation of essential brain structures.
