1. Patterns of brain activation were measured with whole brain echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 3.0 Tesla in healthy children (N = 6) and in one child with a left-hemisphere encephalomalacic lesion as sequellae from early stroke. 2. Three cognitive tasks were used: auditory sentence comprehension, verb generation to line drawings, and mental rotation of alphanumeric stimuli. 3. There was evidence for significant bilateral activation in all three cognitive tasks for the healthy children. Their patterns of activation were consistent with previous functional imaging studies with adults. 4. The child with a left-hemisphere stroke showed evidence of homologous organization in the non-damaged hemisphere.