Semantic Processing In Children Research Articles

The Development of Semantic Processing in Children’s Emotional Advancement: An Analysis of the Movie “Inside Out”

The study focuses on the development of semantic processing in children through the lens of the Disney animated movie “inside out” by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen. Semantic processing is a basic aspect of human knowledge of language processing that enables to extract meaning from the words and to comprehend the intended information conveyed by others. The movie “Inside Out” depicts the story of an 11-year-old girl named Riley and the personification of her emotion Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust as they navigate her life experiences. By analyzing the movie’s plot, characters and dialogues, the study investigates (1) how children’s semantic processing develops over time, (2) how it relates to the ability to understand abstract concepts and how it can impact children’s emotional development. (3) What role do metaphors and analogies play in the semantic development of children depicted in the movie. The goals of this study are to investigate the content, characters, and themes of the movie, to analyze the use of metaphors and analogies in the movie and to explore the relationship between the development of semantic processing and children's emotional advancement. The present study used mixed method to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. The study targeted two different age groups i.e. 5-8 years and 9-12 years to calculate the impact of age on the development of semantic processing. The findings indicate that the movie “Inside Out” successfully engaged the children in reflecting on and succussing their understanding of emotions. Participants demonstrated and enhanced awareness of the importance and complexity of emotions. Also, it provides insight into how animated movies can be used as a tool to promote semantic development in children’s emotional advancement and inform the development of educational materials that can facilitate semantic processing in children.

Development of Gamma Oscillation during Sentence Processing in Early Adolescence: Insights into the Maturation of Semantic Processing.

Children's ability to retrieve word meanings and incorporate them into sentences, along with the neural structures that support these skills, continues to evolve throughout adolescence. Theta (4-8 Hz) activity that corresponds to word retrieval in children decreases in power and becomes more localized with age. This bottom-up word retrieval is often paired with changes in gamma (31-70 Hz), which are thought to reflect semantic unification in adults. Here, we studied gamma engagement during sentence processing using EEG time-frequency in children (ages 8-15) to unravel the developmental trajectory of the gamma network during sentence processing. Children heavily rely on semantic integration for sentence comprehension, but as they mature, semantic and syntactic processing units become distinct and localized. We observed a similar developmental shift in gamma oscillation around age 11, with younger groups (8-9 and 10-11) exhibiting broadly distributed gamma activity with higher amplitudes, while older groups (12-13 and 14-15) exhibited smaller and more localized gamma activity, especially over the left central and posterior regions. We interpret these findings as support for the argument that younger children rely more heavily on semantic processes for sentence comprehension than older children. And like adults, semantic processing in children is associated with gamma activity.

Characteristics of Semantic Processing in Children with Reading Difficulties through Grammaticality Judgment Task

Objectives: Previous studies have reported that children with poor reading show deficiencies in their ability to suppress unnecessary information during reading; however, most studies have used homonym tasks to prove this. Accordingly, we tried to look into the semantic processing characteristics of children with poor reading in sentence-level processing to expand the results of precedent studies away from the homonym task paradigm. Methods: 11 children with poor reading and 12 typical children in 3-6 grade participated. They conducted the grammaticality judgment task to judge whether there were any grammatical errors in the presented sentences. At that time, we recorded reaction accuracy and reaction time. The grammaticality judgment task was divided into the semantic-related condition and the semantic-unrelated condition according to the meaning connection intensity of two words in the sentences. Results: In response accuracy, both children with poor reading and typical children performed lower in the semantic-unrelated condition than in the semantic-related condition, but there were no significant differences in the performance of the two groups. In response time, children with poor reading overall took longer to judge grammaticality than typical children, and notably spent more time reacting in the semantic-unrelated condition than the semantic-related condition. Conclusion: Children with poor reading have difficulties suppressing unnecessarily active information compared to typical children. This tendency to allocate cognitive resources to unnecessary information when they read could ultimately be one of the factors that cause them to fail to comprehend reading.

Semantic processing in children with autism spectrum disorder

El presente estudio analizó el procesamiento semántico de un grupo de niños con trastorno del espectro autista (n= 24), con el objetivo principal de averiguar si presentan diferencias en comparación con un grupo de niños con desarrollo típico (n = 24). Para ello, se realizó un análisis del contenido de los ítems del subtest de información del WPPSY-III, estableciendo una serie de categorías en función del tipo de demanda semántica requerida: asociación significante-significado, relación experiencial y conocimiento general. Los resultados obtenidos apoyan la idea de que los niños con autismo realizarían un procesamiento semántico de la información de la misma manera que los niños sin autismo, pero necesitarían más tiempo para asumir y establecer dicho procesamiento semántico.

Rhythmic and textural musical sequences differently influence syntax and semantic processing in children

Effects of music on language processing have been reported separately for syntax and for semantics. Previous studies have shown that regular musical rhythms can facilitate syntax processing and that semantic features of musical excerpts can influence semantic processing of words. It remains unclear whether musical parameters, such as rhythm and sound texture, may specifically influence different components of linguistic processing. In the current study, two types of musical sequences (one focusing on rhythm and the other focusing on sound texture) were presented to children who were requested to perform a syntax or a semantic task thereafter. The results revealed that rhythmic and textural musical sequences differently influence syntax and semantic processing. For grammaticality judgments, children’s performance was better after regular rhythmic sequences than after textural sound sequences. In the semantic evocation task, children produced more numerous and more various concepts after textural sound sequences than after regular rhythmic sequences. These results suggest that rhythm boosts perceptual and cognitive sequencing required in syntax processing, whereas texture promote verbalization and concept activation in verbal production. The findings have implications for the interpretation of musical priming effects and are discussed in the frameworks of dynamic attending and conceptual processing.

Semantic processing in children with cochlear implants: Evidence from event-related potentials

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Existing research has shown that children with significant hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) perform worse than their hearing peers on behavioral measures of spoken language. The present study sought to examine how children with CIs process lexical–semantic incongruence, as indexed by electrophysiological evidence of the N400 effect.Method: Twelve children with CIs, aged between 6 and 9 years, participated in a spoken word–picture matching task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. To determine whether the N400 effect elicited in this group deviated from normal, independent samples t tests and analysis of variance (ANOVA) analyses were used to compare the results of children with CIs against those of a similarly aged typically hearing (TH) group (n = 30). Correlational analyses were also conducted within each group to gauge the degree to which the N400 effect related to behavioral measures of spoken language.Results: An N400 effect was elicited in both groups of CI and TH children. The amplitude and latency of the N400 effect did not differ significantly between groups. Despite the similarity in ERP responses, children with CIs scored significantly lower on behavioral measures of spoken word- and sentence-level comprehension. No significant correlations between ERP and behavioral measures were found, although there was a trending relationship between sentence-level spoken language comprehension and the TH group’s N400 effect mean amplitude (p = .060).Conclusions: The results suggest that, at a neural level, children with CIs can process lexical–semantic incongruence, and that other underlying processes not measured by the N400 effect contribute to this population’s spoken language difficulties.

ERP evidence of semantic processing in children with ASD

25% of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain minimally verbal (MV), despite intervention. Electroencephalography can reveal neural mechanisms underlying language impairment in ASD, potentially improving our ability to predict language outcomes and target interventions. Verbal (V) and MV children with ASD, along with an age-matched typically developing (TD) group participated in a semantic congruence ERP paradigm, during which pictures were displayed followed by the expected or unexpected word.An N400 effect was evident in all groups, with a shorter latency in the TD group. A late negative component (LNC) also differentiated conditions, with a group by condition by region interaction. Post hoc analyses revealed that the LNC was present across multiple regions in the TD group, in the mid-frontal region in MVASD, and not present in the VASD group. Cluster analysis identified subgroups within the ASD participants. Two subgroups showed markedly atypical patterns of processing, one with reversed but robust differentiation of conditions, and the other with initially reversed followed by typical differentiation. Findings indicate that children with ASD, including those with minimal language, showed EEG evidence of semantic processing, but it was characterized by delayed speed of processing and limited integration with mental representations.

Semantic processing in children 0 to 6 years of age: an N400 analysis

ABSTRACT This study consists of a literature review about the semantic processing in children 0 to 6 years of age and an N400 data analysis. Twenty-four studies that met the eligibility criteria were found. Most studies aimed to investigate and characterize the electrophysiological patterns of younger children as compared to those found in older children and adults. A large variability of employed experimental tasks was found, showing that there are various investigation alternatives in this perspective. In general, the joint analysis of the results pointed out that despite the different objectives, types of experimental tasks and degrees of language skills (i.e., typical development or different conditions), age was a relevant factor in establishing the presence or not of the N400 effect and its lateralization. When present, the N400 effect showed that the latency and amplitude of the wave decline according to age. However, the variability of procedures can affect the degree of control and the data reliability. For further studies, the development of a standard protocol to investigate the semantic processing by means of the N400 effect data in different populations is an important step and a strong recommendation for the area.

Gamma EEG Activation During Picture‐Word Semantic Processing in 3 Year Olds Varies As A Function of Gender And Infant Diet

Semanticrelationships between images and words essential for language comprehension andcognitive function begin to emerge in toddlers, but it is not known if theearly development of these relationships is modulated by infant diet andgender. In this study 254 healthy 3yr‐olds [breast‐fed (BF: 86, 42 boys), or fed milk formula (MF: 88, 40 boys),or soy formula (SF: 80, 44 boys) as infants] viewed images of known objects/animalswhile hearing single words that were either congruent or incongruent with theimages, or were non‐words. For each ofthese image‐word conditions we used ANOVA to compare group, gender, and groupby gender‐related changes in frontal and temporal gamma (30–50 Hz) EEG powerduring the word relative to an immediately preceding baseline. Gamma activityis considered to index activation of associative memory networks, with gammaresponse amplitude increasing with memory strength. All word types elicitedincreases in gamma amplitude, and across groups at both frontal and temporalsites increases were significantly greater to congruent and incongruent wordscompared with non‐words (p < 0.05). Significant gender influences were evident as main effects andgroup‐gender interactions (p < 0.05), reflecting greater gamma amplitudeincreases in boys than girls—most prominent in SF children and least evident inBF children—and in SF compared with MF boys. These findings are the first tolink infant diet and gender to brain activity indexing cross‐modality semanticrelationships in toddlers. The results provide evidence that early infantdiet‐gender interactions may contribute differentially to the development offunctional neural networks involved in semantic processing in children, andsuggest that semantic relationships at this time are more strongly developed inSF boys.Support or Funding InformationFunded by USDA‐ARS Project 6026‐51000‐010‐05S

Lexical Processing in School-Age Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Specific Language Impairment: The Role of Semantics.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) often have immature lexical-semantic knowledge; however, the organization of lexical-semantic knowledge is poorly understood. This study examined lexical processing in school-age children with ASD, SLI, and typical development, who were matched on receptive vocabulary. Children completed a lexical decision task, involving words with high and low semantic network sizes and nonwords. Children also completed nonverbal updating and shifting tasks. Children responded more accurately to words from high than from low semantic networks; however, follow-up analyses identified weaker semantic network effects in the SLI group. Additionally, updating and shifting abilities predicted lexical processing, demonstrating similarity in the mechanisms which underlie semantic processing in children with ASD, SLI, and typical development.

Inhibition of Automatic Semantic Processing in Children With High-Functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorders Having Reading Difficulty

Inhibition of Automatic Semantic Processing in Children With High-Functioning Pervasive Developmental Disorders Having Reading Difficulty

Semantic Processing in Children and Adults: Incongruity and the N400

Semantic processing in 10-year-old children and adults was examined using event related potentials (ERPs). The N400 component, an index of semantic processing, was studied in relation to sentences that ended with congruent, moderately incongruent, or strongly incongruent words. N400 amplitude in adults corresponded to levels of semantic incongruity with the greatest amplitude occurring to strongly incongruent sentences at all midline electrodes. In contrast, children's N400s were greater for both moderately and strongly incongruent sentences but did not differ between these levels of incongruity. This finding suggests that semantic processing may differ in adults and children.

Implicit phonological and semantic processing in children with developmental dyslexia: Evidence from event-related potentials

Dyslexia is characterized by a core phonological deficit, although recent studies indicate that semantic impairment also contributes to this condition. In this study, event-related potentials (ERP) were used to examine whether the N400 wave in dyslexic children is modulated by phonological or semantic priming, similarly to age-matched controls. ERPs were recorded while children listened to word lists in which the semantic and phonological congruency of the terminal words were manipulated. No overt judgments were made by participants. In control children the N400 amplitude to both semantically and phonologically incongruent words was enlarged relative to congruent words. Dyslexic children exhibited a dissociation of priming effects depending on whether semantic or phonological primes were used. Semantic priming elicited an N400 effect comparable to controls, though delayed. In phonological priming, the dyslexics differed from controls in both the phonologically incongruent and congruent conditions showing reduced N400 amplitude in the former and enhanced N400 in the latter. This pattern suggests that when faced with phonological priming, dyslexics show abnormal neural responses related to both integration of similarities between the consecutive stimuli and the ability to detect incongruent stimuli. Semantic priming seems relatively intact in dyslexics, however neural responses to contextual incongruency are delayed.

Verbal and nonverbal semantic processing in children with developmental language impairment.

In an effort to clarify whether semantic integration is impaired in verbal and nonverbal auditory domains in children with developmental language impairment (a.k.a., LI and SLI), the present study obtained behavioral and neural responses to words and environmental sounds in children with language impairment and their typically developing age-matched controls (ages 7-15 years). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while children performed a forced-choice matching task on semantically matching and mismatching visual-auditory, picture-word and picture-environmental sound pairs. Behavioral accuracy and reaction time measures were similar for both groups of children, with environmental sounds eliciting more accurate responses than words. In picture-environmental sound trials, behavioral performance and the brain's response to semantic incongruency (i.e., the N400 effect) of the children with language impairment were comparable to those of their typically developing peers. However, in picture-word trials, children with LI tended to be less accurate than their controls and their N400 effect was significantly delayed in latency. Thus, the children with LI demonstrated a semantic integration deficit that was somewhat specific to the verbal domain. The particular finding of a delayed N400 effect is consistent with the storage deficit hypothesis of language impairment (Kail & Leonard, 1986) suggesting weakened and/or less efficient connections within the language networks of children with LI.

Phonological and semantic processing in children with developmental dyslexia – evidence form ERPs.

Phonological and semantic processing in children with developmental dyslexia – evidence form ERPs.

Children with reading disorder show modality independent brain abnormalities during semantic tasks

Neuroimaging studies have suggested that left inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule and left middle temporal gyrus are critical for semantic processing in normal children. The goal of the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to determine whether these regions are systematically related to semantic processing in children (9- to 15-year-old) diagnosed with reading disorders (RD). Semantic judgments required participants to indicate whether two words were related in meaning. The strength of semantic association varied continuously from higher association pairs (e.g., king–queen) to lower association pairs (e.g. net–ship). We found that the correlation between association strength and activation was significantly weaker for RD children compared to controls in left middle temporal gyrus and left inferior parietal lobule for both the auditory and the visual modalities and in left inferior frontal gyrus for the visual modality. These results suggest that the RD children have abnormalities in semantic search/retrieval in the inferior frontal gyrus, integration of semantic information in the inferior parietal lobule and semantic lexical representations in the middle temporal gyrus. These deficits appear to be general to the semantic system and independent of modality.

Differential prefrontal–temporal neural correlates of semantic processing in children

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain–behavior correlations in a group of 16 children (9- to 12-year-olds). Activation was measured during a semantic judgment task presented in either the visual or auditory modality that required the individual to determine whether a final word was related in meaning to one of two previous words (e.g., found– tank– lost). The main finding was that higher performers (i.e., accuracy) were associated with more activation in posterior representational systems including the inferior and middle temporal gyri, whereas lower performers were associated with more activation in anterior regions including the inferior and middle frontal gyri. This pattern of results was interpreted as reflecting an elaborated semantic representational system in temporal areas for the high accuracy performers that allowed them to efficiently and accurately make meaning based judgments. The low accuracy performers may have an inaccurate or weakly interconnected semantic system that results in greater use of frontal areas in a feature selection process.

Auditory Event-Related Potentials during Phonetic and Semantic Processing in Children

This study was designed to follow the time course of different levels of linguistic processing using auditory event-related potentials (AERPs). A hierarchical set of acoustically controlled stimuli was used to elicit AERPs in 20 normal children who performed discrimination tasks involving pure tones, phonetic ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ stimuli and semantic stimuli. Results show that (1) AERP latencies were similar for phonetic ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ stimuli, (2) prolonged P₂, N₂ and P₃ latencies characterized semantic processing compared to phonetic processing, (3) a late negativity was elicited during semantic processing only, (4) P₃ amplitudes were larger over the left compared to right scalp during linguistic processing (phonetic and semantic) but were similar during nonlinguistic processing (pure tones) and (5) reaction time was found to be longest for semantic processing whereas performance accuracy was found to be an insensitive measure. These results provide insight into brain processes underlying the perception of speech. Furthermore, they support a dual model of speech perception that includes parallel and serial processing.

Semantic Processing in Children's Free Recall: The Effects of Context and Meaningfulness on Encoding Variability

Semantic Processing in Children's Free Recall: The Effects of Context and Meaningfulness on Encoding Variability

Semantic Processing in Children's Free Recall: The Effects of Context and Meaningfulness on Encoding Variability

Semantic Processing in Children's Free Recall: The Effects of Context and Meaningfulness on Encoding Variability