University of Minnesota Moment: Learning Language

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. Magnetoencephalography is a mouthful; MEG, for short, is also the measurement of magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity in the brain. Yang Zhang, a researcher at the U of M, uses MEG to study language development in infants and as a diagnostic tool for kids with language problems.

[Zhang]: We look at infants' development—from newborns to six-month-olds to twelve-month-olds—and we tested about 43 infants to see their brain responses to pure tones, to musical phrases, and to syllables. So we want to see whether the infants have a kind of typical development towards various kinds of stimuli. For infants to pick up and sort out all the sounds is not an easy task.

[Moore]: Zhang explains the complexity of learning a language.

[Zhang]: Language is very complicated. We tend to think of it as a very easy topic, but if you look at, for example, kids having problems with language, then we realize a very complicated process is going on. This machine would tell us whether this child has some problem in those areas, and then we can provide that information to speech pathologists.

[Moore]: The U of M has one of the few MEG diagnostic machines in the country. In fact, only about a hundred exist worldwide. With the University of Minnesota Moment, I'm Rick Moore.