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. New
imaging techniques have allowed us to identify the neuronal network sup-
porting language functions. Techniques providing a high temporal resolution
have started to describe the time course of the neuronal activity related to
particular language functions, such as phonological, prosodic, syntactic, and
lexical-semantic aspects as well as the possible interplay between these. The
picture 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. The
combination 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 Developmental
Cognitive Neuroscience. Research in adult cognitive neuroscience for differ-
ent cognitive faculties such as memory, attention, and language, has not even
begun in the area of the developmental cognitive neuroscience. This may be
due to several reasons.
(1) The scientific community in developmental cognitive neuroscience
mainly interested in human cognition may not work in close contact with
the developmental neuroscience community and often use nonhuman pri-
mates as subjects. When considering the area of language the reason why
these 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.
65
0093-934X/00 $35.00
Copyright  2000 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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etiology cases so successfully investigated in adult cognition do not exist

with the same systematicity in children.
(3) Invasive imaging techniques such as PET cannot be applied normally
to children for ethical reasons.
There are surely many other challenges to the maturation of the field of
developmental cognitive neuroscience.
The issue of how brain development and cognitive development in the
area of language development co-occur in early development and over a
lifetime will be one of the key issues in the coming decades of the third
millennium. 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. Three
central 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 be
informationally encapsulated in early development. For example, highly in-
terconnected brain systems may be tuned toward less interactivity due to
particular input. Syntax may be a candidate that follows such a develop-
mental course (Friederici, 1990). After identifying the particular syntactic
structures in a given language, the processing of these may become more and
more automatic and thereby independent of, for example, lexical semantic
information.
Second, the relative contribution of the left and the right hemisphere to
language processing may well change over life time. There is some recent
evidence 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 adults
we 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 can
speculate that the right hemisphere is of major import once for early language
acquisition. For an adequate description of the language–brain relationship
during early language development it would be important to know whether
this assumption about the early involvement of the right hemisphere holds
and, moreover, when and under what conditions the left hemisphere comes
into play and finally gets dominant in processing language. There is some
recent, although somewhat indirect, evidence that early brain lesions (before
the age of 2 years) in the right hemisphere lead to more severe deficits in
language acquisition that early brain lesions in the left hemisphere (Bates,
Thal, Trauner, Fenson, Aram, Eisele & Nass, 1997). This finding seems to
support the view of the primary importance of the right hemisphere in early
language 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 5

and 8 years demonstrated a nonfluent, Broca-type of aphasia independent of
whether the lesion site was left anterior or left temporal (Friederici, 1994).
This finding was taken to suggest that a fluent aphasia can only emerge after
the language system has reached a highly automatic status. From adult stud-
ies we know that highly automatic syntactic procedures are supported by the
Broca’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 left
temporal region but intact left inferior frontal region show a fluent aphasia.
Children, on the other hand, who have not yet developed highly automatic
syntactic procedures (to be established in the inferior frontal regions) do not
show a fluent aphasia when the temporal region is lesioned (and the inferior
frontal region is intact). These data seem to indicate that there is a shift in
the relative contribution of the different language-related brain regions over
a lifetime.
Third, the relative contribution of different subsystems or their coordina-
tion in time may also change in late adulthood. Depending on the mechanics
and automaticity of different subsystems supporting language processing
major shifts of the relative contribution of these will be observed in late
adulthood. A first indication comes from recent event-related brain potential
studies in normal adults showing that the brain responses to processes of
lexical-semantic integration are slowed down (Gunter, Jackson, & Mulder,
1995). Brain responses evoked by early syntactic processes, i.e., first-pass
parsing are age independent whereas those correlated processes of structural
reanalysis or repair are slowed down with age (Gunter, Vos, & Friederici,
1999). The impact of these differential slowing processes for language
comprehension and the possible compensatory mechanisms are not yet speci-
fied.
In conclusion, it appears that the issue of the language–brain relationship
during early development as well as in late adulthood is a terra incognita.
This state of affairs is largely due to technological constraints. Recently, we
have seen the first results suggesting a rich area of investigation. New brain
imaging techniques such as fMRI and further development of neurophysio-
logical methods such as EEG and MEG will provide us with new tools to
persue these issues. We just have to learn to use them appropriately (and
whenever necessary to adapt the testing procedures) in order to learn about
the language brain relation in its developmental course over lifetime.

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