Brain and Language 71, 65–68 (2000)doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2214, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

The Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience of Language:A New Research Domain

Angela D. Friederici

Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany

Over the past decades the field of Cognitive Neuroscience has made enor-mous progress, also with respect to the language–brain relationship. Newimaging techniques have allowed us to identify the neuronal network sup-porting language functions. Techniques providing a high temporal resolutionhave started to describe the time course of the neuronal activity related toparticular language functions, such as phonological, prosodic, syntactic, andlexical-semantic aspects as well as the possible interplay between these. Thepicture we are able to draw today is by no means perfect or even complete,but we are beginning to see rough overall shapes as well as details in it. Thecombination of the new techniques combined with psycholinguistic theoriz-ing will clarify the picture over the decades to come.

A new and challenging field of research concerning the study of the lan-guage and the brain for the next decade(s) is the area of DevelopmentalCognitive Neuroscience. Research in adult cognitive neuroscience for differ-ent cognitive faculties such as memory, attention, and language, has not evenbegun in the area of the developmental cognitive neuroscience. This may bedue to several reasons.

(1) The scientific community in developmental cognitive neurosciencemainly interested in human cognition may not work in close contact withthe developmental neuroscience community and often use nonhuman pri-mates as subjects. When considering the area of language the reason whythese communities do not come together is all too obvious.

(2) Systematic lesion studies in children are rarely possible as the vascular

I thank Doug Saddy for comments on the manuscript.Address correspondence and reprint requests to Angela D. Friederici, Max Planck In-

stitute of Cognitive Neuroscience, P.O. Box 500 355, 04303 Leipzig, Germany. E-mail:angelafr@cns.mpg.de.

650093-934X/00 $35.00

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etiology cases so successfully investigated in adult cognition do not existwith the same systematicity in children.

(3) Invasive imaging techniques such as PET cannot be applied normallyto children for ethical reasons.

There are surely many other challenges to the maturation of the field ofdevelopmental cognitive neuroscience.

The issue of how brain development and cognitive development in thearea of language development co-occur in early development and over alifetime will be one of the key issues in the coming decades of the thirdmillennium. So far, little is known about this issue, but there are first indica-tions that there is much to learn. Improvements in new brain imaging tech-niques such as fMRI and high-density EEG and MEG methods and the devel-opment of new technologies will allow us to investigate these issues. Threecentral areas should occupy our attention in the coming years. First, the de-velopment of particular cognitive and linguistic functions as well as the inter-action between these is not independent of brain development. That is, cogni-tive functions that appear to be modular in the adult behavior may not beinformationally encapsulated in early development. For example, highly in-terconnected brain systems may be tuned toward less interactivity due toparticular input. Syntax may be a candidate that follows such a develop-mental course (Friederici, 1990). After identifying the particular syntacticstructures in a given language, the processing of these may become more andmore automatic and thereby independent of, for example, lexical semanticinformation.

Second, the relative contribution of the left and the right hemisphere tolanguage processing may well change over life time. There is some recentevidence that infants heavily rely on prosodic information during early lan-guage acquisition (Jusczyk, 1997; Kemler Nelson, Hirsh-Pasek, Jusczyk &Wright Cassidy, 1989; Morgan, 1997). From recent fMRI studies in adultswe know that prosodic information is mainly processed in the right hemi-sphere (Steinhauer, Alter, Meyer, Friederici, & von Cramon, 1999; Meyer,Friederici, & von Cramon, 1999). On the basis of these findings one canspeculate that the right hemisphere is of major import once for early languageacquisition. For an adequate description of the language–brain relationshipduring early language development it would be important to know whetherthis assumption about the early involvement of the right hemisphere holdsand, moreover, when and under what conditions the left hemisphere comesinto play and finally gets dominant in processing language. There is somerecent, although somewhat indirect, evidence that early brain lesions (beforethe age of 2 years) in the right hemisphere lead to more severe deficits inlanguage acquisition that early brain lesions in the left hemisphere (Bates,Thal, Trauner, Fenson, Aram, Eisele & Nass, 1997). This finding seems tosupport the view of the primary importance of the right hemisphere in earlylanguage development. In an overview of a number of studies investigating

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childhood aphasia it became apparent that children between the age of 5and 8 years demonstrated a nonfluent, Broca-type of aphasia independent ofwhether the lesion site was left anterior or left temporal (Friederici, 1994).This finding was taken to suggest that a fluent aphasia can only emerge afterthe language system has reached a highly automatic status. From adult stud-ies we know that highly automatic syntactic procedures are supported by theBroca’s area and/or the left frontal operculum (for an overview see Frieder-ici, 1999). Thus it may not be surprising that adults with lesions in the lefttemporal region but intact left inferior frontal region show a fluent aphasia.Children, on the other hand, who have not yet developed highly automaticsyntactic procedures (to be established in the inferior frontal regions) do notshow a fluent aphasia when the temporal region is lesioned (and the inferiorfrontal region is intact). These data seem to indicate that there is a shift inthe relative contribution of the different language-related brain regions overa lifetime.

Third, the relative contribution of different subsystems or their coordina-tion in time may also change in late adulthood. Depending on the mechanicsand automaticity of different subsystems supporting language processingmajor shifts of the relative contribution of these will be observed in lateadulthood. A first indication comes from recent event-related brain potentialstudies in normal adults showing that the brain responses to processes oflexical-semantic integration are slowed down (Gunter, Jackson, & Mulder,1995). Brain responses evoked by early syntactic processes, i.e., first-passparsing are age independent whereas those correlated processes of structuralreanalysis or repair are slowed down with age (Gunter, Vos, & Friederici,1999). The impact of these differential slowing processes for languagecomprehension and the possible compensatory mechanisms are not yet speci-fied.

In conclusion, it appears that the issue of the language–brain relationshipduring early development as well as in late adulthood is a terra incognita.This state of affairs is largely due to technological constraints. Recently, wehave seen the first results suggesting a rich area of investigation. New brainimaging techniques such as fMRI and further development of neurophysio-logical methods such as EEG and MEG will provide us with new tools topersue these issues. We just have to learn to use them appropriately (andwhenever necessary to adapt the testing procedures) in order to learn aboutthe language brain relation in its developmental course over lifetime.

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Friederici, A. D. 1990. On the properties of cognitive modules. Psychological Research, 52,175–180.

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