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Event Related Potentials to Native and Nonnative Phoneme Contrasts and Early Reading Abilities in School-Aged Children
Poster B28 in Poster Session B and Reception, Thursday, October 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Vanessa Harwood1, Alisa Baron1, Raphael Diaz1, Emily Jelfs1; 1University of Rhode Island
Phonological awareness skills are strongly predictive of word reading abilities in early school aged children, yet their underlying neural mechanisms remain unknown. The mismatch negativity (MMN) response is a highly studied event related potential (ERP) component that is thought to reflect the discrimination of a change in a stream of repeated sounds (Näätänen, 1992). Several studies have investigated the relationship among the MMN response and reading ability in general (Volkmer & Schulte-Körne, 2018). Additionally, researchers have found that a relationship exists between the MMN response to native phonological contrasts and phonological processing skills, specifically phonological awareness, in school-aged children (Linnavalli et al., 2017; Norton et al., 2021). Fewer studies have investigated the relationship between the MMN response recorded to native and nonnative speech contrasts and phonological awareness skills. It is possible that a strong neural commitment to the native language precipitates early phonological awareness. Here we investigate the relationship between the MMN response in school-age children recorded in response to two English phonemic contrasts and two Spanish allophonic contrasts with standardized measures of phonemic awareness. Methods: Thirty-three monolingual 1st and 2nd grade students (Mage= 7.0 yrs, SD = 7 mos) participated in the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing Skills, Second Edition (CTOPP-2) as well as 2 passive auditory oddball tasks containing either English (/ta/ and /pa/) or Spanish (/t̪a/ and /d̪a/) contrasts. Stimuli were played within the sound field as children watched a silent movie. Results: Electrode montages and timeframes of interest were chosen based on previous literature on the MMN in young children (Linnavalli et al., 2017; Norton et al., 2021). Preliminary analyses revealed the MMN over a cluster of 6 electrodes within the right central region for both English and Spanish experiments. The difference wave was calculated by subtracting the deviant-standard waveforms within the timeframe of 100-300ms for each contrast separately. Latency within the difference wave for English contrasts was correlated with several standardized scores of phonological awareness on the CTOPP-2 (Phonological Awareness Composite, r = .42, p = 0.01, Blending Words, r = .37, p = .03, and Phoneme Isolation, r = .54, p = .01). There were no significant correlations between latency measures of the difference wave for Spanish contrasts and phonological awareness measures of the CTOPP-2 for the group (Phonological Awareness Composite, r = -.20, p = .27, Blending Words, r = -.04, p = .84, and Phoneme Isolation, r = -.07, p = .79). Discussion: Phonological awareness is critical for reading success and therefore the neural mechanisms which underlie this skill warrants exploration. The MMN response may be a sensitive measure of the neural processes related to efficient auditory and/or phonemic processing that are shared with phonological awareness skills. The nature of the neural commitment to the native language revealed by the MMN and its association with phonological awareness in young children will be discussed.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Reading