Mismatch Negativity and Late Discriminative Negativity in Investigating Speech Perception and Learning in Children and Infants

Abstract

For decades, behavioral methods, such as the head-turning or sucking paradigms, have been the primary tools to investigate speech perception and learning of a language in infancy. Recently, however, new methods provided by event-related potentials have emerged. These are called mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discriminative negativity (LDN). MMN, the brain’s automatic change-detection response in audition, has been intensively used in adults in both basic and clinical studies for longer than 20 years. LDN, on the other hand, was only recently discovered. There seem to be many differences between these two responses. MMN is developmentally quite stable and can be obtained even from preterm infants. LDN, however, can be obtained most reliably from young children, and its amplitude decreases as a function of age. New data suggest that both of these responses have a special role in language processing, although both of them can also be elicited by nonspeech stimuli.

Newborns discriminate novel from harmonic sounds: A study using magnetoencephalography

“…The LDN seems to decrease with age (Cheour et al, 2001). In newborns, it occurs around 300 -750 ms after stimulus onset.…”

“…The LDN is a second deflection sometimes found in newborn studies (e.g., Čeponiene et al, 2002;Kushnerenko et al, 2002a;Martynova et al, 2003), but more often in children (for a review, see Cheour et al, 2001). The LDN seems to decrease with age (Cheour et al, 2001).…”

Saliency or template? ERP evidence for long-term representation of word stress

“…LDN has been shown to appear for complex speech sounds and reflect higher-order, cognitive processing of stimuli (Ceponiene et al, 2004), but has been found mostly in the case of children Cheour et al, 2001). At the same time, Horváth et al (2009) obtained LDN in adults, and attributed its appearance to the complexity of the paradigm, and to the richness of the stimuli.…”

ATP2C2 and DYX1C1 are putative modulators of dyslexia‐related MMR

“…Differences among both groups were tested using a sliding window t ‐test and revealed that MMR of both groups significantly differed within the interval between 200 and 400 ms ( p  < .05). This window is partially overlapping with the 300–600 ms window for which group‐wise differences between dyslexics and controls are often reported (Alonso‐Búa, Díaz, & Ferraces, 2006; Cheour, Korpilahti, Martynova, & Lang, 2001; Schulte‐Körne et al., 1998). Therefore, we decided to use the 300–600 ms time window (often called late component of the MMR) for all subsequent analyses in order to enhance comparability with previous studies.…”

“…Also in accordance with previous reports, discrimination was found to be strong in a time window near 400 ms (Figure 1, Alonso‐Búa et al., 2006; Cheour et al., 2001). The validity of selected SNPs for dyslexia in our cohort was strengthened as we found significant improvement in reclassification good and poor spelling probands when using of a score created from these SNPs in addition to the late component of the MMR.…”