Brain responses to change in phonological structures of varying complexity in children and adults

Abstract

Language-related change-detection processes are often investigated using syllables that are very simple in terms of phonological structure. However, phonological complexity is known to be challenging for young typically developing children and pathological populations. We investigated brain correlates of phonological processing and their age-related changes with a passive change-detection protocol including stimuli of varying phonological complexity, which allowed comparing responses to simple and complex phonological deviancies. Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and Late Discriminative Negativity (LDN) responses were recorded in both school-age children (n = 22) and adults (n = 24). MMN was similar for simple and complex phonological deviancy in both groups, whereas LDN appeared to be modulated by phonological complexity, albeit with different patterns according to age. In response to complex phonological change, children displayed a larger LDN response with a typical fronto-central scalp distribution, while adults showed an additional rightposterior activity but no larger amplitude than for simple change. Thus, LDN appears to be a good electrophysiological index of phonological complexity processing. This study validated the use of the LDN through this protocol for the investigation of phonological complexity processing throughout the development.

Formant‐invariant voice and pitch representations are pre‐attentively formed from constantly varying speech and non‐speech stimuli

“…This notion was further strengthened by similar results obtained by Liu et al (2014) with consonant and lexical tone contrasts in pre‐school and school‐aged Mandarin speaking children. David et al (2020) also reported a larger LDN in children with respect to adults, elicited by phonologically complex rather than simple multisyllabic non‐words. Although this transfer mechanism for regularities could be relevant for language learning, our findings together with previous studies (Zachau et al, 2005) suggest that it is not necessarily language‐specific.…”

“…This component was tentatively identified as the late discriminative negativity (LDN), which was also reported in another study encompassing the abstract‐feature paradigm as “Late MMN” (Zachau et al, 2005). Previous studies that used the canonical oddball paradigm reported the presence of this component over different time windows scattered across the 350–600 ms interval (Choudhury et al, 2015; David et al, 2020; Honbolygó et al, 2017). Given the absence of a priori hypotheses on its presence and/or modulation, the analysis of this component must be considered explorative.…”

“…The interpretation of the sustained negativity as LDN may not be completely straightforward. The scarcity of studies conducted on adults, paired with sometimes inconsistent results, prevents the identification of clear‐cut spatiotemporal characteristics for this specific component (which has indeed been analysed in multiple time windows; e.g., 300–550 ms in Bishop et al, 2011; 350–600 ms in David et al, 2020; 425–475 in Honbolygó et al, 2017; 250–400 ms in Zachau et al, 2005). It is important to point out that the cluster‐based permutation approach we employed for statistical analyses warrants against strong conclusions on components onset and offset latencies (Sassenhagen & Draschkow, 2019), further complicating the comparison with previous studies.…”

Relationship between early neural responses to syntactic and acoustic irregularities in music

“…Several studies have measured the late discriminative negativity (LDN) that follows the MMN and have found that the latency overlaps with the N5 (Honbolygó et al, 2017; Peter et al, 2012). Although the LDN is considered to reflect cognitive‐level processing of deviant stimuli (Čeponiene et al, 2004), its functional significance remains unclear (David et al, 2020). It is necessary to closely examine the functional significance of the late negativities elicited by music‐syntactic irregularities and acoustic irregularities in future research.…”

Asymmetric Influence of Vocalic Context on Mandarin Sibilants: Evidence From ERP Studies

“…Along with MMN, an additional negativity, the late discriminative negativity (LDN), was observed in our study. The LDN is a recently established component found in oddball paradigms and serves as an index of phonological discriminative abilities (Hill et al, 2004;Horváth et al, 2009;Jakoby et al, 2011;David et al, 2020). Similar to the MMN, the LDN is also an automatic response associated with higher cognitive processes and may represent the recruitment of additional cortical resources needed to extract the phonological differences between the standard and deviant stimulus and form phonological representations (Shestakova et al, 2003;Hill et al, 2004;Zachau et al, 2005;Barry et al, 2009).…”