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Examining the role of phonological and semantic mechanisms during morphological processing of sentences in seven-year-old children

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Marjolein Mues¹ (marjolein.mues@vanderbilt.edu), Avantika Mathur¹, James Booth¹; ¹Vanderbilt University

Introduction: Morphological skill is a linguistic feature impacting language and literacy outcomes. Its neural underpinnings have mostly been examined at the word-level. We examined if phonological and semantic mechanisms play a role during morphological processing in sentences in seven-year-old children and whether language skills were associated with a greater reliance on either mechanism. Methods: This study was pre-registered. We examined the dorsal pathway (phonology; left posterior STG; IFG opercularis) and the ventral pathway (semantics; left posterior MTG; IFG triangularis). We selected the top 500 voxels associated with phonology and semantics using a novel functional localizer approach that correlated activation with standardized scores for phonology and semantics. We examined activation in these voxels during an in-scanner morphology task that included sentences with and without morphological error. Language skill was characterized behaviorally. Results: Both phonological regions were significantly activated during the morphology task, compared to only one of the semantic regions (IFG triangularis). We did not observe a correlation with language in our ROIs. Exploratory whole-brain analyses revealed a brain-behavior correlation in the cerebellum showing that greater activation was related to lower language abilities. We also examined morphological processing in five-year-olds, but did not observe significant results, likely due to a small sample (n = 32 while n = 100 for seven-year-olds). Conclusion: Our results suggest that processing morphological structures in sentences relies on phonemic segmentation and those with lower language may compensate for lower phonological skill by engaging the cerebellum to amplify and refine those phonemic representations to aid in segmentation.

Topic Area: METHODS: Neuroimaging