Children who sustain a prenatal or perinatal brain injury intheform of a stroke develop remarkably normal cognitivefunctions in certain areas, with a particular strength in language skills. A dominant explanation for this is that brain regions from the contralesional hemisphere “take over” their functions, whereas the damaged areas and other ipsilesional regions play much less of a role. However, it is difficult to tease apart whether changes in neural activity after early brain injury are due to damage caused by the lesion or by processes related to postinjury reorganization. We sought to differentiate between these two causes by investigating the functional connectivity (FC) of brain areas during the resting state in human children with early brain injury using a computational model. We simulated a large-scale network consisting of realistic models of local brain areas coupled through anatomical connectivity information of healthy and injured participants. We then compared the resulting simulated FC values of healthy and injured participants with the empirical ones. We found that the empirical connectivity values, especially of the damaged areas, correlated better with simulated values of a healthy brain than those of an injured brain. This result indicates that the structural damage caused by an early brain injury is unlikely to have an adverse and sustained impact on the functional connections, albeit during the resting state, of damaged areas. Therefore, these areas could continue to play a role in the development of near-normal function in certain domains such as language in these children.

M.H.A. and G.D. weresupported bythe European Research Council(Advanced Grant DYSTRUCTURE 295129). The imaging data analyzed in this study were obtained as part of a project at The University of Chicago in language development that was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development–National Institutes of Health (Grant P01 HD040605). Their support is gratefully acknowledged, as is the help of our coinvestigators on that grant, Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Cohen Levine, and our research assistant, Victoria Li. The authors declare no competing financial interests