Two groups of school-aged children before puberty and after puberty were trained on thirty novel japanese words consisting of new concepts, referring to unfamiliar objects in order to investigate the neural correlates of newly learned words and how these learned words might change over time (Takashima, Bakker-Marshall, van Hell, McQueen, and Janzen, 2019). The neural underpinnings were investigated with fMRI during the participants performed a lexical-decision task to reveal the word-form memory representations, either directly after the training or after a delay of one week. The behavioral outcomes of the participants were assessed as well concerning cued and free recall to test the meanings of the new words. By making use of a semantic priming task, the authors also investigated lexicalization integration effect, in which novel words that were learned were applied as primes for target words that were either semantically associated with the primes or not (Takashima et al., 2019).
The behavioral results reveiled that children had the capacity to learn new words in one training session as well as retaining those words in memory during one week. The lexicalization effect, which is indexed by semantic priming was not found in children, which was contrary to the expectations of the authors (Takashima et al., 2019).
The fMRI results revealed that the activation of the hippocampus did show a decrease over time. It was expected that their would be found enhanced activation in the posterior middle temporal gyrus with time, however this effect was not observed. It was found that there was a shift in the involvement from the right to the left hemisphere among primary school children and secondary school children. This is suggestive to be a result of the maturation of the language network (Takashima et al., 2019).
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