Prof. ZHANG Caicai, Department of Language Science and Technology

Neurocognitive mechanisms of developmental language disorders. The 8th International Symposium of the Chinese Association for Psycholinguistics. The Chinese Association for Psycholinguistics (CAP) and Xi’an Jiaotong University, School of Foreign Studies, Xian, 12-14 June 2006.

Abstract
The neurocognitive processes underlying how children acquire language—and how these processes are disrupted in children with developmental language disorders—are not fully understood. It has been proposed that evolutionarily old, domain-general declarative and procedural memory systems contribute to language acquisition. Impairments in these systems, particularly in the procedural memory system, have been proposed to account for many symptoms of developmental language disorders. In this talk, I will present recent findings from my lab examining how procedural and declarative memory—including their behavioral manifestations, memory consolidation, and neural substrates—contribute to typical and atypical language development in Chinese children. Using theory-driven and neuroimaging approaches, our findings provide partial support for the hypothesized roles of declarative and procedural memory systems, while also revealing nuanced patterns that extend current theoretical models. These results advance our understanding of the neurocognitive foundations of child language acquisition and have potential clinical implications for improving the diagnosis and intervention of developmental language disorders.