Children With a History of SLI Show Reduced Sensitivity to Audiovisual Temporal Asynchrony: An ERP Study

Abstract

Purpose We examined whether school-age children with a history of SLI (H-SLI), their typically developing (TD) peers, and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Method 15 H-SLI children, 15 TD children, and 15 adults judged whether a flashed explosion-shaped figure and a 2 kHz pure tone occurred simultaneously. The stimuli were presented at 0, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 ms temporal offsets. This task was combined with EEG recordings. Results H-SLI children were profoundly less sensitive to temporal separations between auditory and visual modalities compared to their TD peers. Those H-SLI children who performed better at simultaneity judgment also had higher language aptitude. TD children were less accurate than adults, revealing a remarkably prolonged developmental course of the audiovisual temporal discrimination. Analysis of early ERP components suggested that poor sensory encoding was not a key factor in H-SLI children’s reduced sensitivity to audiovisual asynchrony. Conclusions Audiovisual temporal discrimination is impaired in H-SLI children and is still immature during mid-childhood in TD children. The present findings highlight the need for further evaluation of the role of atypical audiovisual processing in the development of SLI.

Musicians have enhanced audiovisual multisensory binding: experience-dependent effects in the double-flash illusion

“…Deficits in audiovisual integration and reduced sensitively to audiovisual asynchrony have also been observed in children with a history of language learning disorders (Kaganovich et al 2014). In contrast, musical training has been shown to actually enhance both of these perceptual-cognitive traits, i.e., speech-language function (Kraus and Chandrasekaran 2010;Besson et al 2011;Moreno and Bidelman 2014) and multisensory processing (present study; Musacchia et al 2007;Lee and Noppeney 2011;Paraskevopoulos et al 2012;Lee and Noppeney 2014).…”

“…Emerging evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological studies suggests the inability to assimilate information from more than one sense may underlie a series of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and dyslexia (for review, see Wallace and Stevenson 2014). Under this proposition, the brain's "temporal window" for integrating multiple sensory cues is extended, producing an aberrant binding of multisensory features and deficits in creating single unified percepts (Foss-Feig et al 2010;Kaganovich et al 2014;Wallace and Stevenson 2014). Similarly, synaesthetes who display multimodal percepts (e.g., tones inducing color percepts) show altered multisensory integration windows, consistent with their hypersensitive perception and crosspairing of the senses (Neufeld et al 2012).…”

Development of sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony during midchildhood.

“…This finding is in general agreement with the study by Hillock-Dunn and Wallace (Hillock-Dunn & Wallace, 2012), who reported that children's performance on the SJT did not correlate with verbal or non-verbal IQ, reading ability, or socioeconomic status but did correlate with age. Therefore, while we know that sensitivity to multisensory temporal asynchrony gradually increases during mid-childhood and is impaired in a number of developmental disorders (for a comprehensive review of this issue, see Wallace & Stevenson, 2014), such as autism (Foss-Feig et al, 2010; Kwakye, Foss-Feig, Cascio, Stone, & Wallace, 2011; Stevenson et al, 2014), specific language impairment (SLI) (Grondin et al, 2007; Kaganovich et al, 2014), and dyslexia (Hairston, Burdette, Flowers, Wood, & Wallace, 2005), the functional significance of multisensory temporal function for language and, more generally, for cognitive development is poorly understood and requires future study. One possibility for the lack of a relationship between children's performance on the SJT and measures of other cognitive abilities is that the selected standardized tests were either not sensitive enough to individual differences or were not focusing on the skills that would be most profoundly affected by a weak audiovisual temporal function.…”

“…The simultaneity judgment task (SJT) used in this study was identical to that described in an earlier study from our laboratory (Kaganovich et al, 2014). Prior to the start of the session, all participants viewed a video with instructions and practiced the task until it was clear.…”

“…Yet, according to the 2012 study, perception of VA asynchronies remains immature all throughout the teen years. In an earlier study from our laboratory, we also examined sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony in 7-11 year old typically developing (TD) children, same age children with a history of specific language impairment (H-SLI), and adults (Kaganovich, Schumaker, Leonard, Gustafson, & Macias, 2014). Similarly to the studies by Hillock and colleagues, we used simple stimuli (an explosion-shaped flash and a pure tone) presented at 100 to 500 ms SOAs in 100 ms intervals.…”