Driving factors of neural specialization

Functional connectivity drives the neural specialization for phonological and semantic specialization in 7 to 9-year-old children.

Citations: Mathur, Wang & Booth. (2025) in Imaging Neuroscience (see original paper).

Findings:

• By measuring functional connectivity during a phonological awareness task and a semantic association task using psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis, we extracted connectivity values for phonological processing between the top 100 specialized voxels in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) and the top 100 specialized voxels in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG), as well as connectivity values for semantic processing between the top 100 specialized voxels in the left ventral inferior frontal gyrus (vIFG) and the top 100 specialized voxels in the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Using a longitudinal design, we found that functional connectivity for phonological processing at age 7 negatively predicted neural specialization for phonology in the left STG at age 9. Similarly, functional connectivity for semantic processing at age 7 negatively predicted neural specialization for semantics in the left MTG at age 9. These findings support the core hypothesis of the Interactive Specialization account—that functional connectivity drives the development of neural specialization. Although the observed negative relations were unexpected, one tentative explanation is that greater reliance on communication between frontal linguistic control regions and temporal representational regions may enhance task-solving efficiency (e.g., during phonological processing), thereby reducing the need for strong representational engagement in the corresponding temporal region. Consequently, neural specialization—indexed by greater activation for one linguistic component (e.g., phonology) relative to another (e.g., semantics) in this current study—would appear reduced.

Educational or practical implications:

• Functional connectivity should be considered a key driving force in the development of neural specialization and may serve as an earlier predictor of skill acquisition than regional specialization itself. Further longitudinal research is needed to confirm this hypothesis.

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