Normal developmental changes of language and motor maps.

This study concerns age-related changes in brain functional organization for language and motor control in healthy children, adolescents and adults. The project includes large age group samples from 6 years into middle adulthood studied with fMRI during syntactic, semantic and motor task performance. The study is embedded in evidence from basic neuroscience demonstrating an experientially influenced interplay of constructive and regressive events in normal brain development. Our specific question is whether task-related activations may become more focal and lateralized during normal development, as suggested by some previous fMRI studies in children.