Nonintrusive Imaging Technique Useful For Identifying Language Regions In Ki...( thout moving their mouths which causes...),Health

For their efforts, the researchers were rewarded with useful fMRI images from 15 of the 17 youngsters. All the subjects were imaged as they spelled words such as "cat" and "dog." The words were picked to suit their language skills by Royal Grueneich, Ph.D., assistant clinical professor of neurology.

These trials involved a series of five words presented to the youngsters over headphones. The children were given five seconds to spell a word before the next one in the series was delivered. A 25-second break followed in which they were asked to count silently, with the whole process repeated five times for each trial.

In other trials, the six teens were tested using a similar procedure for their ability to generate words from a sequence of five beginning letters. Both the word spelling and the word generation trials were performed at least twice. The images from the trials revealed that the left hemisphere was the language center for 10 of the children who completed both trials successfully. Four children also favored the left side of the brain in one trial, and one child didn't show greater left hemisphere activity, or lateralization, in either trial. Lee said an inability of the latter children to focus appropriately or perform the language tasks well might have hampered the detection of lateralization.

Previous studies with the Wada test and other imaging methods had drawn similar conclusions about language activity in children's brains. But the images were created after data were pooled and averaged from images of many patients, which may mask differences between individuals. Even so, Lee was not completely surprised by the current study's findings. "In adults, most people handle language on one side of the brain, so why shouldn't young children, who speak using the same (mental)
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Contact: Barbra Rodriguez
rodrigub@medicine.wustl.edu
314-286-0122
Washington University in St. Louis
8-Apr-1999