We report infant auditory event-related potentials to native and foreign contrasts. Foreign contrasts are discriminated at 11 months of age, showing significant differences between the standard and deviant over the positive (P150-250), or over the negative (N250-550) part of the waveform. The amplitudes of these deflections have different amplitude scalp distributions. Infants were followed up longitudinally at 18, 22, 25, 27 and 30 months for word production. The infant speech discriminatory P150-250 and N250-550 are different components with different implications for later language development.
Online comprehension of naturally spoken and perceptually degraded words was assessed in 95 children ages 12 to 31 months. The time course of word recognition was measured by monitoring eye movements as children looked at pictures while listening to familiar target words presented in unaltered, time-compressed, and low-pass-filtered forms. Success in word recognition varied with age and level of vocabulary development, and with the perceptual integrity of the word. Recognition was best overall for unaltered words, lower for time-compressed words, and significantly lower in low-pass-filtered words. Reaction times were fastest in compressed, followed by unaltered and filtered words. Results showed that children were able to recognize familiar words in challenging conditions and that productive vocabulary size was more sensitive than chronological age as a predictor of children's accuracy and speed in word recognition.Understanding spoken language seems to be an easy task for adults with robust processing skills, even in difficult listening conditions such as on a bad telephone line or in a crowded room. Adults are efficient listeners not only under normal acoustic circumstances but also in situations where the quality of speech is degraded due to increased speaking rate or reduced spectral information (Lane
In a previous event-related brain potential study, we provided evidence that preschoolers display different brain electrical patterns to semantic content and syntactic structure processing. In the present study, we aimed to determine the time-course of these event-related potential effects in 30-month-old children, using the same syntactically anomalous, semantically anomalous and control sentences that we used in our previous study. The results show that semantic violations elicit a frontal negativity peaking around 600 ms, whereas the morphosyntactic violations elicit a slow positive shift peaking around 800 ms with a frontocentral distribution. Our findings replicate the event-related potential patterns previously observed in young children and indicate that the neural signatures of sentence processing can be observed at an early point in development.
Most deaf children and adults struggle to read, but some deaf individuals
do become highly proficient readers. There is disagreement about the specific
causes of reading difficulty in the deaf population, and consequently,
disagreement about the effectiveness of different strategies for teaching
reading to deaf children. Much of the disagreement surrounds the question of
whether deaf children read in similar or different ways as hearing children. In
this study, we begin to answer this question by using real-time measures of
neural language processing to assess if deaf and hearing adults read
proficiently in similar or different ways. Hearing and deaf adults read English
sentences with semantic, grammatical, and simultaneous semantic/grammatical
errors while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The magnitude of
individuals’ ERP responses was compared to their standardized reading
comprehension test scores, and potentially confounding variables like years of
education, speechreading skill, and language background of deaf participants
were controlled for. The best deaf readers had the largest N400 responses to
semantic errors in sentences, while the best hearing readers had the largest
P600 responses to grammatical errors in sentences. These results indicate that
equally proficient hearing and deaf adults process written language in different
ways, suggesting there is little reason to assume that literacy education should
necessarily be the same for hearing and deaf children. The results also show
that the most successful deaf readers focus on semantic information while
reading, which suggests aspects of education that may promote improved literacy
in the deaf population.
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