Immature cortical responses to auditory stimuli in specific language impairment: evidence from ERPs to rapid tone sequences

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) to tone pairs and single tones were measured for 16 participants with specific language impairment (SLI) and 16 age-matched controls aged from 10 to 19 years The tone pairs were separated by an inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of 20, 50 or 150 ms. The intraclass correlation (ICC) was computed for each participant between the ERP to a single tone and the ERP to the tone pair. A high ICC indicates that the brain response to a tone pair is similar to that for a single tone. ICCs were significantly higher at short than at long ISIs. At 50-ms ISI, ICCs were higher for younger than older participants. Age and ISI interacted with SLI status: ERPs of older participants with SLI differed from age-matched controls, and resembled ERPs of younger controls, consistent with a theory of immature auditory processing in SLI.

Learning problems, delayed development, and puberty

“…The present data thus add a set of nonlinguistic perceptual abilities to a growing list of wideranging skills reported to be delayed in children with LPs (15,17,(21)(22)(23)(24). They also are consistent with a recent proposal that reduced processing efficiency can explain the excessive amounts of auditory masking in individuals with LPs (33), because processing efficiency improves with increasing age (34).…”

“…One implication of these ideas is that the combination of delayed (15,17,(21)(22)(23)(24) and prematurely arrested development may account for an array of abnormalities observed in LP individuals compared with same-age controls. Consistent with this view, abnormalities in LP adults often occur on measures on which normal development extends into adolescence and thus might be halted by puberty.…”

“…Others have reported evidence that children with LPs are late to reach a broad range of developmental milestones (21) and suggested that developmental delay may play a key role in LPs (15,17,(22)(23)(24). What we add is that, because of this delay, further development on attributes with normally long developmental courses seems to be halted by sexual maturation.…”

Detection of silent gaps in white noise following cortical deactivation in rats

“…In humans, rapid temporal processing of acoustic information is developmentally important to the acquisition of normal speech and language [12,13,14]. Given that auditory cortical circuits have been shown to play an important role in the processing of rapidly changing acoustic information in rodents [1,2] and humans [14,15,16], it follows that early disruption of cortical development (e.g., neuronal migration) could alter subsequent auditory temporal discrimination. In fact, cumulative findings show that developmental cortical disruption results in widespread alterations of cortical anatomy and physiology, in rodent models and also developmentally disabled populations with evidence of neural anomalies [17,18,19,20].…”

Children with Specific Language Impairment Also Show Impairment of Music-syntactic Processing

“…Given the reported overlap in the neural networks for language and music, we hypothesized that children with SLI (having deficiencies in the processing of linguistic syntax) will also have difficulties in the processing of musical syntax. Bishop and McArthur (2004) measured ERPs to tone pairs and single tones but not to musical phrases (see also .…”