Electrophysiological correlates of rapid auditory and linguistic processing in adolescents with specific language impairment

Abstract

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral and electrophysiological indices for rapid auditory processing were correlated with those for linguistic processing. Fifteen adolescents with SLI and 15 adolescents with normal language met strict criteria for displaying consistent diagnoses from kindergarten through the eighth grade. The findings provide evidence that auditory processing for non-linguistic stimuli is atypical in a significant number of adolescents with SLI compared to peers with normal language and indicate that reduced efficiency in auditory processing in SLI is more vulnerable to rapid rates (200 ms ISI) of stimuli presentation (indexed by reduced accuracy, a tendency for longer RTs, reduced N100 over right anterior sites, and reduced amplitude P300). Many adolescents with SLI displayed reduced behavioral accuracy for detecting verbagreement violations and semantic anomalies, along with less robust P600s elicited by verbagreement violations. The results indicate that ERPs elicited by morphosyntactic aspects of language processing are atypical in many adolescents with SLI. Additionally, correlational analyses between behavioral and electrophysiological indices of processing non-linguistic stimuli and verb-agreement violations suggest that the integrity of neural functions for auditory processing may only account for a small proportion of the variance in morphosyntactic processing in some adolescents.

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

“…For example, Neville and colleagues (Neville, Coffey, Holcomb, & Tallal, 1993) reported that N1 to standard tones was reduced at short ISIs over the right hemisphere sites in school-age language-impaired children. A similar finding was also reported for adolescents with SLI (Weber-Fox, Leonard, Hampton Wray, & Tomblin, 2010). Similarly, McArthur and Bishop (Bishop & McArthur, 2004; McArthur & Bishop, 2005) showed that children and young adults with SLI have age-inappropriate ERP components (including N1) to a range of sounds, not just pure tones.…”

Attentional But Not Pre-Attentive Neural Measures of Auditory Discrimination Are Atypical in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

“…For example, Benasich et al (2006) found that the latency of the N250 (the component preceding the auditory mismatch response in infants) at 6 months predicted expressive and receptive language abilities of at-risk children at 24 months. Weber-Fox and colleagues (2010) found that the auditory P3 amplitude was weakly to moderately related to the amplitude of a different neural response to verb agreement violations in adolescents with DLD. Taken together, these studies warrant further investigation of the functional role of pre-attentive and attentional auditory and phonological processing and discrimination components in the atypical language development in DLD.…”

Research on Memory in Specific Language Impairment (Sli)

“…Christine Weber-Fox and associates (Weber-Fox, Leonard, Wray, Tomblin & 2010) analyzed neuronal activity in 15 persons ranging in age from 14 to 18 years with a childhood diagnosis of SLI, and found that the potentials evoked by grammatical language tasks are atypical in many adolescents with SLI, as opposed to the potentials for nonverbal tasks.…”