Neurocognitive investigation of syntactic processing on school-aged children: A cross-sectional study

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By using simultaneous functional near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the stages of L2 syntactic processing in Japanese elementary school children who learn English at school. In the processing of sentences with word order violations, increased bilateral cortical activation was found in the high proficiency group with more left lateralization compared to the low proficiency group. The positive ERP component was also observed in the high proficiency group. These results suggest that children are gradually acquiring the ability to recognize L2 grammatical rules (phrase structure rules) by learning them in the foreign language context.