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Cortical tracking of continuous speech in young children with typical language development (TLD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)
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Poster D87 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Ana Campos Espinoza1,2, Paul Iverson1; 1University College London, 2Universidad San Sebastian
Although multiple adult studies have demonstrated that cortical tracking of the speech envelope (or ‘entrainment’) is key for spoken language comprehension, little is known about how this mechanism develops in young children (i.e. between the ages of 3-6 years). For example, in adults, envelope tracking correlates with speech perception performance and is modulated by prior language knowledge and attention. However, it is unclear whether the same occurs in children or if atypical entrainment patterns play a role in language disorders, as has been reported in dyslexia or autism spectrum disorder. Thus, we asked whether cortical envelope tracking would vary between young children and adults and between children with different language skills. This study aimed to investigate cortical responses to continuous speech in children with typical language development (TLD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and compare them to those observed in adults. We recorded EEG during unattended listening of continuous speech (18 short stories, average total time 12.5 minutes) in two groups of Spanish-speaking children (age 4.7 to 5.7 years, Mage=5.05, SD=0.48, no age differences): a group with previous DLD diagnosis (n=17), a TLD group (n=12), and a group of neurotypical adults (n=17, Mage=33.4, SD=4.3). Individual Multivariate Temporal Response Functions (mTRFs) were estimated to predict the speech broadband envelope (2-32 Hz) from the cortical responses (EEG) using backward linear modelling (Crosse et al., 2016). Permutation-based analysis confirmed above-chance performance of the mTRF decoders in all our groups of participants, with significantly higher Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) for models estimated from actual speech-EEG data pairs than from randomly matched ones (TLD, Z= -2.667, p=.008; DLD, Z= -3.636, p<.001; Adults, Z=-3.621, p<.001). At the individual level, statistically significant neural tracking was detected in 67.7% of the TLD children, 76.5% of the DLD children and 88.3% of the adults, with correlation coefficients above the 95th percentile compared to a null distribution of r values. However, we found no between-group differences in the r magnitudes [F(2,46)=1.49, p=.237], with similar strength of the neural tracking observed in the TLD (M=0.11, SD=0.04), DLD (M= 0.12 SD=0.05) and adult group (M=0.14, SD=0.33), although with a small effect size (ηp²=.065), and low power (30%). At the functional level, these findings suggest that (i) adult-like, unattended tracking of the speech acoustic envelope is already in place during early childhood, (ii) children with DLD show no deficits in cortical speech envelope processing, and (ii) neural entrainment to speech in unattended conditions is similar between groups with different language abilities. Therefore, it is unclear whether language effects modulate envelope tracking in children under these experimental conditions and at this age range. As a next step, we will further analyse potential sources of within-individual variability (e.g. differences in baseline EEG levels or amounts of data) and neural tracking of speech lexical features. Crosse, M. J., Di Liberto, G. M., Bednar, A., & Lalor, E. C. (2016). The Multivariate Temporal Response Function (mTRF) Toolbox: A MATLAB Toolbox for Relating Neural Signals to Continuous Stimuli. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10, 604. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00604
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Disorders: Developmental