Development of auditory event-related potentials in young children and relations to word-level reading abilities at age 8 years

Abstract

A relationship between brain responses at birth and later emerging language and reading skills have been shown, but questions remain whether changes in brain responses after birth continue to predict the mastery of language-related skills such as reading development. To determine whether developmental changes in the brain-based perceptual skills are systematically related to differences in wordlevel reading proficiency at age 8 years, brain event-related potentials (ERPs) to speech and nonspeech stimuli were recorded annually at the ages of 1 through 8 years in a sample of 109 typically developing children. Two measures of wordlevel reading (one that requires decoding of real words and one of pseudowords) were administered at age 8 years. Growth curve analysis, using the hierarchical linear models, related reading performance (average versus low) to the longitudinal maturation in the ERP waveform peak and latencies. Maturational changes (e.g., slope, acceleration, and cubic growth) in N1 amplitude from ages 1 to 4 were related to proficiency in decoding pseudoword stimuli only, with children who were less proficient in decoding pseudowords evidencing more steeply negative declines in amplitude with age, particularly at the frontal and parietal recording sites in response to both speech and nonspeech stimuli. In contrast, proficiency in decoding real words was related to developmental changes in N2 amplitudes from ages 4 to 8 only at the parietal recording site, and only in response to nonspeech stimuli. The early development of biologically based differences in the perception and processing of auditory information contributes to later group differences in reading proficiencies at school age.

Speech Evoked Potentials: From the Laboratory to the Clinic

“…Rather, there is evidence that the speech-evoked P1-N1-P2 complex provides a better index of the access a particular individual has to the acoustic cues contained within the speech signal underlying the perception and production of language (Kelly, et al, 2005;Kileny, et al, 1997;Oates, et al, Reference Note 3). In fact, there have been a number of studies that have linked various speech-evoked cortical ERPs to later language development (Espy, et al, 2004;Guttorm, et al, 2005;Jansson-Verkasalo, et al, 2004;Kurtzberg, 1989;Kurtzberg, et al, 1988;Molfese, 2000).…”

A longitudinal study of auditory evoked field and language development in young children

“…Their results demonstrated that infants with larger responses and shorter peak latencies from 6 to 9 months old had better language and cognitive skills at 3 and 4 years old. Moreover, other studies have reported that brain responses to auditory stimuli in infancy and childhood are associated with subsequent language-related skills (Espy et al, 2004) or language impairments such as dyslexia (Leppänen et al, 2010(Leppänen et al, , 2012. However, to date, there has been no study that has followed this change in the brain response evoked by vocal stimuli using a longitudinal design or that has investigated its relationship to language development in young, typically developing children without family risk factors for language-related impairment (e.g., dyslexia).…”

Improvement in non-linguistic executive functions following reading acceleration training in children with reading difficulties: An ERP study

“…Third, here we have demonstrated the effect of the RAP training on an executive functions task, but in order to generalize our conclusions, a future study should demonstrate the change in these target-locked components in other tasks that are not related to executive functions. Fourth, based on the wide literature examining the differences in amplitude and latency of ERP components in 7-18 year-old children, it seems that the critical effect of development is on ERP component's amplitudes ( [1]; see also [22] for children younger than 8 years). Therefore, the analysis of the current study was at the level of activation (i.e., on peak amplitude) and did not include the components' latencies.…”