Anti-phasic oscillatory development for speech and noise processing in cochlear implanted toddlers

Abstract

Human brain demonstrates amazing readiness for speech and language learning at birth, but the auditory development preceding such readiness remains unknown. Cochlear implanted (CI) children with prelingual deafness provide a unique opportunity to study this developmental stage. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we revealed that the brain of CI children was nearly irresponsive to sounds at CI hearing onset. With increasing CI experiences up to 32 months, the brain demonstrated function, region and hemisphere specific development. Most strikingly, the left anterior temporal lobe showed an oscillatory trajectory, changing in opposite phases for speech and noise. In addition, speech responses increased linearly in left sylvian parieto-temporal area and right inferior frontal gyrus, and noise responses changed in U shape in right supramarginal gyrus. Such cortical development predicted behavioral improvement. The study provides the first longitudinal brain imaging evidence for early auditory development preceding speech acquisition in the human brain.

Controlling jaw-related motion artifacts in functional near-infrared spectroscopy

“…To visualize the tasked-evoked activations to auditory stimuli, we calculated the topographies based on block averages of HbO. The averaged HbO amplitude during a stimulation window (5–18 s) was compared to the averaged HbO amplitude during a resting window (20–30 s) by a two-tailed paired-sample t-test, following a more sensitive approach of detecting the fNIRS activations ( Wu et al, 2022 ). Multiple comparisons correction on the topographies was addressed by the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure, resulting in a false discovery rate thresholded at 0.05 ( Benjamini and Hochberg, 1995 ).…”