Comprehension Passage
Read the passage and answer the following questions.
To understand language (more specifically, processing spoken sentences), children use both the brain’s hemispheres, right and left -- quite different from what adults do. The new finding suggests a possible reason why children appear to recover from neural injury much easier than adults. According to Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists, infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task.
Published in PNAS, the study focuses on one task, language, and finds that to understand language children use both hemispheres. This finding fits with previous and ongoing research, led by Georgetown neurology professor Elissa L. Newport, PhD. “This is very good news for young children who experience a neural injury,” said Newport. “Use of both hemispheres provides a mechanism to compensate after a neural injury. For example, if the left hemisphere is damaged from a prenatal stroke - one that occurs right after birth - a child will learn a language using the right hemisphere. A child born with cerebral palsy that damages only one hemisphere can develop needed cognitive abilities in the other hemisphere. Our study demonstrates how that is possible,” Newport added.
Their study solves a mystery that has puzzled clinicians and neuroscientists for a long time, said Newport. In almost all adults, sentence processing is possible only in the left hemisphere, according to both brain scanning research and clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke. But in very young children, damage to either hemisphere is unlikely to result in language deficits; language can be recovered in many patients even if the left hemisphere is severely damaged. These facts suggest that language is distributed to both hemispheres early in life, Newport says.
She also says that, if the team were able to do the same analysis in even younger children, “it is likely we would see even greater functional involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing than we see in our youngest participants (ages 4-6 years old).“Our findings suggest that the normal involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing during very early childhood may permit the maintenance and enhancement of right hemisphere development if the left hemisphere is injured,” Newport says. The investigators are now examining language activation in teenagers and young adults who have had a major left hemisphere stroke at birth.
According to the passage, 'puzzled' refers to -
1
able to understand or comprehend
2
caused (someone) to feel confused because they cannot understand something.
3
become fully aware of (something)
4
identify from knowledge of appearance or character.