Relationships between quantity of language input and brain responses in bilingual and monolingual infants

Estimating infants' language exposure: A comparison of random and volume sampling from daylong recordings collected in a bilingual community

In North America, the characteristics of a child's language environment predict language outcomes. For example, differences in bilingual language exposure, exposure to electronic media, and exposure to child-directed speech (CDS) relate to children's language growth. Recently, these predictors have been studied through the use of daylong recordings, followed by manual annotation of audio samples selected from these recordings. Using a dataset of daylong recordings collected from bilingually raised infants in the United States as an example, we ask whether two of the most commonly used sampling methods, random sampling and sampling based on high adult speech, differ from each other with regard to estimating the frequencies of specific language behaviors. Daylong recordings from 37 Spanish-English speaking families with infants between 4 and 22 months of age were analyzed. From each child's recording, samples were extracted in two ways (at random/based on high adult speech) and then annotated for Language (Spanish/English/Mixed), CDS, Electronic Media, Social Context, Turn-Taking, and Infant Babbling. Correlation and agreement analyses were performed, in addition to paired sample t-tests, to assess how the choice of one or the other sampling method may affect the estimates. For most behaviors studied, correlation and agreement between the two sampling methods was high (Pearson r values between 0.79 and 0.99 for 16 of 17 measures; Intraclass Correlation Coefficient values between 0.78 and 0.99 for 13 of 17 measures). However, interesting between-sample differences also emerged: the degree of language mixing, the amount of CDS, and the number of conversational turns were all significantly higher when sampling was performed based on high adult speech compared to random sampling. By contrast, the presence of electronic media and one-on-one social contexts was higher when sampling was performed at random. We discuss advantages of choosing one sampling technique over the other, depending on the research question and variables at hand.

Neural correlates of lexical-tone and vowel-quality processing in 6- and 9-month-old German-learning infants and adults

We examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of lexical-tone and vowel-quality perception in learners of a non-tonal language. We tested 25 6- and 25 9-month-old German-learning infants, as well as 24 German adults and expected developmental differences for the two linguistic properties, as they are both carried by vowels, but have a different status in German. In adults, both lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts elicited mismatch negativities, with a stronger response to the vowel-quality contrast. Six-month-olds showed positive mismatch responses for lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts, with an emerging negative mismatch response for vowel-quality only. The negative mismatch responses became more pronounced for the vowel-quality contrast at 9 months, while the lexical-tone contrast elicited mainly positive mismatch responses. Our data reveal differential developmental changes in the processing of vowel properties that differ in their lexical relevance in the ambient language.

Individual differences in auditory perception predict learning of non-adjacent tone sequences in 3-year-olds

Auditory processing of speech and non-speech stimuli oftentimes involves the analysis and acquisition of non-adjacent sound patterns. Previous studies using speech material have demonstrated (i) children's early emerging ability to extract non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) and (ii) a relation between basic auditory perception and this ability. Yet, it is currently unclear whether children show similar sensitivities and similar perceptual influences for NADs in the non-linguistic domain. We conducted an event-related potential study with 3-year-old children using a sine-tone-based oddball task, which simultaneously tested for NAD learning and auditory perception by means of varying sound intensity. Standard stimuli were A × B sine-tone sequences, in which specific A elements predicted specific B elements after variable × elements. NAD deviants violated the dependency between A and B and intensity deviants were reduced in amplitude. Both elicited similar frontally distributed positivities, suggesting successful deviant detection. Crucially, there was a predictive relationship between the amplitude of the sound intensity discrimination effect and the amplitude of the NAD learning effect. These results are taken as evidence that NAD learning in the non-linguistic domain is functional in 3-year-olds and that basic auditory processes are related to the learning of higher-order auditory regularities also outside the linguistic domain.

Neural specificity for semantic and syntactic processing in Spanish-English bilingual children

Brain development for language processing is associated with neural specialization of left perisylvian pathways, but this has not been investigated in young bilinguals. We examined specificity for syntax and semantics in early exposed Spanish-English speaking children (N = 65, ages 7-11) using an auditory sentence judgement task in English, their dominant language of use. During functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the morphosyntax task elicited activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the semantic task elicited activation in left posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Task comparisons revealed specialization in left superior temporal (STG) for morphosyntax and left MTG and angular gyrus for semantics. Although skills in neither language were uniquely related to specialization, skills in both languages were related to engagement of the left MTG for semantics and left IFG for syntax. These results are consistent with models suggesting a positive cross-linguistic interaction in those with higher language proficiency.

Event Related Potentials to Native Speech Contrasts Predicts Word Reading Abilities in Early School-Aged Children

Speech perception skills have been implicated in the development of phoneme-grapheme correspondence, yet the exact nature of speech perception and word reading ability remains unknown. We investigate phonological sensitivity to native (English) and nonnative (Spanish) speech syllables within an auditory oddball paradigm using event related potentials (ERPs) collected from lateral temporal electrode sites in 33 monolingual English-speaking children aged 6-8 years (N=33). We further explore the relationship between ERPs to English word reading abilities for this group. Results revealed that language stimuli (English, Spanish), ERP condition (standard, deviant), and hemisphere (left, right) all influenced the lateral N1 component. ERPs recorded from deviant English stimuli were significantly more negative within the left hemisphere compared to all other recorded ERPs. Mean amplitude differences within the N1 in left lateral electrode sites recorded in response to English phoneme contrasts significantly predicted English word reading abilities within this sample. Results indicate that speech perception of native contrasts recorded in left temporal electrode sites for the N1 component are linked to English word reading abilities in early school-aged children.

Socioeconomic Status and Cochlear Implant Usage: A Datalogging Study

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the associations between proxy measures of socioeconomic status (SES) and usage of cochlear implants.

STUDY DESIGN

Retrospective case series.

METHODS

Usage outcomes were measured among patients with a cochlear implant and data logging at a tertiary care children's hospital between 2002 and 2017. Time per day with cochlear implant turned on, coil off, and listening to speech in noise and speech in quiet were extracted from audiology records, averaging right and left ear usage for those with bilateral implants. Associations between cochlear implant usage and demographic factors such as insurance type and median household income for zip code were assessed.

RESULTS

There were 142 total patients; 74 had bilateral usage data. Mean on air time was 10.76 hours (SD: 4.4). Those with private insurance had 1.2 hour more on air time/day (P = .047) and 0.9 hour more quiet time/day (P = .011) compared to those with public insurance. Younger age at last visit was associated with increased speech in quiet (B = -.08; 95% CI: -0.12-[-0.05], P < .001) and coil off (B = -0.06; 95% CI: -0.11-[-0.02], P = .006). Younger age at implant was associated with longer duration since last data logging visit (B = -10.46; 95% CI: -18.41-[-2.51], P = .010), more daily use (on air; B = -0.23; 95% CI: -0.43-[-0.03], P = .026), and increased time spent listening to speech in noise (B = -0.07; 95% CI: -0.14-[-0.01], P = .024). No other significant associations between datalogging output and each proxy SES factor were found.

CONCLUSIONS

Lack of private insurance and older age at implantation decreased access to binaural hearing for children and young adults with cochlear implants.

Infant-directed speech does not always involve exaggerated vowel distinctions: Evidence from Danish

This study compared the acoustic properties of 26 (100% female, 100% monolingual) Danish caregivers' spontaneous speech addressed to their 11- to 24-month-old infants (infant-directed speech, IDS) and an adult experimenter (adult-directed speech, ADS). The data were collected between 2016 and 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark. Prosodic properties of Danish IDS conformed to cross-linguistic patterns, with a higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and slower articulation rate than ADS. However, an acoustic analysis of vocalic properties revealed that Danish IDS had a reduced or similar vowel space, higher within-vowel variability, raised formants, and lower degree of vowel discriminability compared to ADS. None of the measures, except articulation rate, showed age-related differences. These results push for future research to conduct theory-driven comparisons across languages with distinct phonological systems.

Korean infants' perceptual responses to Korean and Western music based on musical experience

This study investigates infants' enculturation to music in a bicultural musical environment. We tested 49 12- to 30-month-old Korean infants on their preference for Korean or Western traditional songs played by haegeum and cello. Korean infants have access to both Korean and Western music in their environment as captured on a survey of infants' daily exposure to music at home. Our results show that infants with less daily exposure to any kind of music at home listened longer to all music types. The infants' overall listening time did not differ between Korean and Western music and instruments. Rather, those with high exposure to Western music listened longer to Korean music played with haegeum. Moreover, older toddlers (aged 24-30 months) maintained a longer interest in songs of an origin with which they are less familiar, indicating an emerging orientation towards novelty. Early orientation of Korean infants toward the novel experience of music listening is likely driven by perceptual curiosity, which drives exploratory behavior that diminishes with continued exposure. On the other hand, older infants' orientation towards novel stimuli is led by epistemic curiosity, which motivates an infant to acquire new knowledge. Korean infants' lack of differential listening likely reflects their protracted period of enculturation to ambient music due to complex input. Further, older infants' novelty-orientation is consistent with findings in bilingual infants' orientation towards novel information. Additional analysis showed a long-term effect of music exposure on infants' vocabulary development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kllt0KA1tJk RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Korean infants showed novelty-oriented attention to music such that infants with less daily exposure to music at home showed longer listening times to music. 12- to 30-month-old Korean infants did not show differential listening to Korean versus Western music or instruments, suggesting a protracted period of perceptual openness. 24- to 30-month-old Korean toddlers' listening behavior indicated emerging novelty-preference, exhibiting delayed enculturation to ambient music compared to Western infants reported in earlier research. 18-month-old Korean infants with a greater weekly exposure to music had higher CDI scores a year later, consistent with the well-known music-to-language transfer effect.

Understanding the neural mechanisms for infants' perception of native and non-native speech

Though perceptual narrowing has been widely recognized as a process guiding cognitive development and category learning in infancy and early childhood, its neural mechanisms and traits at a cortical level remain unclear. Using an electroencephalography (EEG) abstract mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, Australian infants' neural sensitivity to (native) English and (non-native) Nuu-Chah-Nulth speech contrasts was examined in a cross-sectional design at the onset (5-6 months) and offset (11-12 months) of perceptual narrowing. Immature mismatch responses (MMR) were observed among younger infants for both contrasts, while older infants showed MMR response to the non-native contrast, and both MMR and MMN to the native contrast. Sensitivity to the Nuu-Chah-Nulth contrast at perceptual narrowing offset was retained yet stayed immature. Findings conform to perceptual assimilation theories, reflecting plasticity in early speech perception and development. Compared to behavioural paradigms, neural examination effectively reveals experience-induced processing differences to subtle contrasts at the offset of perceptual narrowing.

Sensitivity to visual cues within motion events in monolingual and bilingual infants

It is well known that infants undergo developmental change in how they respond to language-relevant visual contrasts. For example, when viewing motion events, infants' sensitivities to background information ("ground-path cues," e.g., whether a background is flat and continuous or bounded) change with age. Prior studies with English and Japanese monolingual infants have demonstrated that 14-month-old infants discriminate between motion events that take place against different ground-paths (e.g., an unbounded field vs a bounded street). By 19 months of age, this sensitivity becomes more selective in monolingual infants; only learners of languages that lexically contrast these categories, such as Japanese, discriminate between such events. In this study, we investigated this progression in bilingual infants. We first replicated past reports of an age-related decline in ground-path sensitivity from 14 to 19 months in English monolingual infants living in a multilingual society. English-Mandarin bilingual infants living in that same society were then tested on discrimination of ground-path cues at 14, 19, and 24 months. Although neither the English nor Mandarin language differentiates motion events based on ground-path cues, bilingual infants demonstrated protracted sensitivity to these cues. Infants exhibited a lack of discrimination at 14 months, followed by discrimination at 19 months and a subsequent decline in discrimination at 24 months. In addition, bilingual infants demonstrated more fine-grained sensitivities to subtle ground cues not observed in monolingual infants.

Examining Shared Reading and White Matter Organization in Kindergarten in Relation to Subsequent Language and Reading Abilities: A Longitudinal Investigation

Parent-child language interaction in early childhood carries long-term implications for children's language and reading development. Conversational interaction, in particular, has been linked to white matter organization of neural pathways critical for language and reading. However, shared book reading serves an important role for language interaction as it exposes children to sophisticated vocabulary and syntax. Despite this, it remains unclear whether shared reading also relates to white matter characteristics subserving language and reading development. If so, to what extent do these environmentally associated changes in white matter organization relate to subsequent reading outcomes? This longitudinal study examined shared reading and white matter organization in kindergarten in relation to subsequent language and reading outcomes among 77 typically developing children. Findings reveal positive associations between the number of hours children are read to weekly (shared reading time) and the fractional anisotropy of the left arcuate fasciculus, as well as left lateralization of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). Furthermore, left lateralization of the SLF in these kindergarteners is associated with subsequent reading abilities in second grade. Mediation analyses reveal that left lateralization of the SLF fully mediates the relationship between shared reading time and second-grade reading abilities. Results are significant when controlling for age and socioeconomic status. This is the first evidence demonstrating how white matter structure, in relation to shared reading in kindergarten, is associated with school-age reading outcomes. Results illuminate shared reading as a key proxy for the home language and literacy environment and further our understanding of how language interaction may support neurocognitive development.

Maturation of consonant perception, but not vowel perception, predicts lexical skills at 12 months

Consonants and vowels differentially contribute to lexical acquisition. From 8 months on, infants' preferential reliance on consonants has been shown to predict their lexical outcome. Here, the predictive value of German-learning infants' (n = 58, 29 girls, 29 boys) trajectories of consonant and vowel perception, indicated by the electrophysiological mismatch response, across 2, 6, and 10 months for later lexical acquisition was studied. The consonant-perception trajectory from 2 to 6 months (β = -2.95) and 6 to 10 months (β = -.91), but not the vowel-perception trajectory, significantly predicted receptive vocabulary at 12 months. These results reveal an earlier predictive value of consonant perception for word learning than previously found, and a particular role of the longitudinal maturation of this skill in lexical acquisition.

Connecting perception and production in early Catalan-Spanish bilingual children: language dominance and quality of input effects

This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/ɛ/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word elicitation task. Overall, Catalan-dominant bilingual children outperformed Spanish-dominant bilinguals, the latter showing high variability in production accuracy, while being slightly above chance level in perception. No correlation between perception and production performance could be established in this group. The effect of language dominance alone could not explain the Spanish-dominant participants' performance, but quality of Catalan input (native vs. accented speech) was identified as an important factor behind familiar-word production and the inaccurate representation of the target contrast in the lexicon of the bilinguals' less-dominant language. More fine-grained measurements of experience-related factors are needed for a full understanding of the acquisition of challenging contrasts in bilingual contexts.

Shining a light on cultural neuroscience: Recommendations on the use of fNIRS to study how sociocultural contexts shape the brain

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a portable neuroimaging technique that may serve as a methodological tool for studying how sociocultural contexts can shape the human brain and impact cognition and behavior. The use of fNIRS in community-based research may (a) advance theoretical knowledge in psychology and neuroscience, particularly regarding underrepresented ethnic-racial communities; (b) increase diversity in samples; and (c) provide neurobiological evidence of sociocultural factors supporting human development. The review aims to introduce the use of fNIRS, including its practicalities and limitations, to new adopters inquiring how sociocultural inputs affect the brain. The review begins with an introduction to cultural neuroscience, and a review on the use of fNIRS follows. Next, benefits and guidelines to the design of fNIRS research in naturalistic environments (in the community or in the field) using a cultural lens are discussed. Strengths-based and community-based approaches in cultural neuroscience are recommended throughout. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The P300 event related potential predicts phonological working memory skills in school-aged children

The P300 event related potential (ERP) has been cited as a marker of phonological working memory (PWM); however, little is known regarding its relationship to behavioral PWM skills in early school-aged children. The current study investigates the P300 ERP recorded in response to native and non-native (English and Spanish) phoneme contrasts as a predictor of PWM skills in monolingual English-speaking first and second grade children. Thirty-three typically developing children, ages 6–9, completed a battery of phonological processing, language, and cognitive assessments. ERPs were recorded within an auditory oddball paradigm in response to both English phoneme contrasts (/ta/, /pa/) and Spanish contrasts (/t̪a/, /d̪a/). The P300 ERP recorded in response to English phoneme contrasts significantly predicted standard scores on the Nonword Repetition subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Second Edition. Spanish contrasts did not elicit a P300 response, nor were amplitude or latency values within the P300 timeframe (250–500 ms) recorded in response to Spanish contrasts related to English nonword repetition performance. This study provides further evidence that the P300 ERP in response to native phonemic contrasts indexes PWM skills, specifically nonword repetition performance, in monolingual children. Further work is necessary to determine the extent to which the P300 response to changing phonological stimuli reflects PWM skills in other populations.

Association of Postpartum Maternal Mood With Infant Speech Perception at 2 and 6.5 Months of Age

IMPORTANCE

Language development builds on speech perception, with early disruptions increasing the risk for later language difficulties. Although a major postpartum depressive episode is associated with language development, this association has not been investigated among infants of mothers experiencing a depressed mood at subclinical levels after birth, even though such a mood is frequently present in the first weeks after birth. Understanding whether subclinical depressed maternal mood after birth is associated with early language development is important given opportunities of coping strategies for subclinical depressed mood.

OBJECTIVE

To examine whether depressed maternal mood at subclinical levels 2 months after birth is associated with infant speech perception trajectories from ages 2 to 6.5 months.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS

In this longitudinal cohort study conducted between January 1, 2018, and October 31, 2019, 46 healthy, monolingual German mother-infant dyads were tested. The sample was recruited from the infants database of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Initial statistical analysis was performed between January 1 and March 31, 2021; the moderation analysis (results reported herein) was conducted between July 1 and July 31, 2022.

EXPOSURES

Mothers reported postpartum mood via the German version of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (higher scores indicated higher levels of depressed mood, with a cutoff of 13 points indicating a high probability of clinical depression) when their infants were 2 months old.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

Electrophysiological correlates of infant speech perception (mismatch response to speech stimuli) were tested when the infants were aged 2 months (initial assessment) and 6.5 months (follow-up).

RESULTS

A total of 46 mothers (mean [SD] age, 32.1 [3.8] years) and their 2-month-old children (mean [SD] age, 9.6 [1.2] weeks; 23 girls and 23 boys) participated at the initial assessment, and 36 mothers (mean [SD] age, 32.2 [4.1] years) and their then 6.5-month-old children (mean [SD] age, 28.4 [1.5 weeks; 18 girls and 18 boys) participated at follow-up. Moderation analyses revealed that more depressed maternal subclinical postpartum mood (mean [SD] Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale score, 4.8 [3.6]) was associated with weaker longitudinal changes of infants' electrophysiological brain responses to syllable pitch speech information from ages 2 to 6.5 months (coefficient: 0.68; 95% CI, 0.03-1.33; P = .04).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

The results of this cohort study suggest that infant speech perception trajectories are correlated with subclinical depressed mood in postpartum mothers. This finding lays the groundwork for future research on early support for caregivers experiencing depressed mood to have a positive association with children's language development.

LANGUAGE EXPOSURE PREDICTS CHILDREN'S PHONETIC PATTERNING: EVIDENCE FROM LANGUAGE SHIFT

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way-by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children's exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

The acquisition of speech categories: Beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy

An early achievement in language is carving a variable acoustic space into categories. The canonical story is that infants accomplish this by the second year, when only unsupervised learning is plausible. I challenge this view, synthesizing five lines of developmental, phonetic and computational work. First, unsupervised learning may be insufficient given the statistics of speech (including infant-directed). Second, evidence that infants "have" speech categories rests on tenuous methodological assumptions. Third, the fact that the ecology of the learning environment is unsupervised does not rule out more powerful error driven learning mechanisms. Fourth, several implicit supervisory signals are available to older infants. Finally, development is protracted through adolescence, enabling richer avenues for development. Infancy may be a time of organizing the auditory space, but true categorization only arises via complex developmental cascades later in life. This has implications for critical periods, second language acquisition, and our basic framing of speech perception.

Longitudinal trajectories of electrophysiological mismatch responses in infant speech discrimination differ across speech features

Infants rapidly advance in their speech perception, electrophysiologically reflected in the transition from an immature, positive-going to an adult-like, negative-going mismatch response (MMR) to auditory deviancy. Although the MMR is a common tool to study speech perception development, it is not yet completely understood how different speech contrasts affect the MMR’s characteristics across development. Thus, a systematic longitudinal investigation of the MMR’s maturation depending on speech contrast is necessary. We here longitudinally explored the maturation of the infant MMR to four critical speech contrasts: consonant, vowel, vowel-length, and pitch. MMRs were obtained when infants (n = 58) were 2, 6 and 10 months old. To evaluate the maturational trajectory of MMRs, we applied second-order latent growth curve models. Results showed positive-going MMR amplitudes to all speech contrasts across all assessment points that decreased over time towards an adult-like negativity. Notably, the developmental trajectories of speech contrasts differed, implying that infant speech perception matures with different rates and trajectories throughout the first year, depending on the studied auditory feature. Our results suggest that stimulus-dependent maturational trajectories need to be considered when drawing conclusions about infant speech perception development reflected by the infant MMR.

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Understanding speech perception development requires longitudinal investigations.

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The Mismatch Response (MMR) is valuable to study infants’ speech perception.

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We investigated the infant MMR longitudinally across three assessment points.

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MMRs to different speech features became more mature during infants’ first year.

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Different MMR trajectories imply feature-dependent maturation of speech perception.

NeonaTal Assisted TelerehAbilitation (T.A.T.A. Web App) for Hearing-Impaired Children: A Family-Centered Care Model for Early Intervention in Congenital Hearing Loss

Background: An early hearing detection and intervention program (EHDI) is the first step for the habilitation of children with permanent hearing impairment (PHI). Actually, early intervention programs have increasingly shifted toward family involvement, emphasizing that the child’s family should take an active role in the habilitation process. Therefore, familiar empowerment is the best way to improve a child’s emerging abilities. The aim of this study was to investigate parental self-efficacy beliefs and involvement as well as the language skills of deaf or hard of hearing DHH children who were habilitated with hearing aids and followed using the T.A.T.A web app (NeonaTal Assisted TelerehAbilitation), an example of asynchronous telepractice. Methods: The study describes the early stages of the habilitation program of 15 PHI children followed through the T.A.T.A. web app, which empowers families through a weekly questionnaire submitted during the first 270 to 360 days of their child’s life, for 14 weeks. The family involvement rate scale (FIRS) was used to evaluate parental compliance, and all children received in-person visits at the beginning and at the end of the training period. Results: The children showed greater auditory perceptual skills at the end of the training period on the basis of both the Infant Listening Progress Profile (ILiP) score and the Categories of Auditory Performance (CAP) and FIRS scales. In other words, the auditory skills improved with age as well as with parental participation. Conclusions: The T.A.T.A. web app promotes a proactive management and a tailored habilitation through an active familiar involvement, easily achieved in clinical routine and in emergency settings without additional costs.

Bilingualism alters infants' cortical organization for attentional orienting mechanisms

A bilingual environment is associated with changes in the brain's structure and function. Some suggest that bilingualism also improves higher-cognitive functions in infants as young as 6-months, yet whether this effect is associated with changes in the infant brain remains unknown. In the present study, we measured brain activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy in monolingual- and bilingual-raised 6- and 10-month-old infants. Infants completed an orienting attention task, in which a cue was presented prior to an object appearing on the same (Valid) or opposite (Invalid) side of a display. Task performance did not differ between the groups but neural activity did. At 6-months, both groups showed greater activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in frontal regions (left hemisphere for bilinguals, right hemisphere for monolinguals). At 10-months, bilinguals showed greater activity for Invalid (> Valid) trials in bilateral frontal regions, while monolinguals showed greater brain activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in left frontal regions. Bilinguals' brain activity trended with their parents' reporting of dual-language mixing when speaking to their child. These findings are the first to indicate how early (dual) language experience can alter the cortical organization underlying broader, non-linguistic cognitive functions during the first year of life.

Event-Related Potentials to Speech Relate to Speech Sound Production and Language in Young Children

This research was funded through the American Speech and Hearing Foundation's 2012 StudentResearch Grant in Early Childhood Language Development awarded to Vanessa Harwood as well as an anonymous generous donation to Haskins Laboratories. Electrophysiological measures of language within early childhood provide important information about neurolinguistic development. We investigated associations between amplitude and latency of the P1 and N2 event-related potential components in response to spoken pseudowords, and clinical measures of language performance within a sample of 58 typically developing children between 24 and 48 months. N2 amplitude differences between repeated and new tokens were correlated with measures of expressive and receptive language and speech sound production. Phonemic sensitivity measured by the N2 component may reflect the integrity of neural networks that are important for speech perception and production in young children.

Language Learning Under Varied Conditions: Neural Indices of Speech Perception in Bilingual Turkish-German Children and in Monolingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

Lateral temporal measures of the auditory evoked potential (AEP) including the T-complex (positive Ta and negative Tb), as well as an earlier negative peak (Na) index maturation of auditory/speech processing. Previous studies have shown that these measures distinguish neural processing in children with typical language development (TD) from those with disorders and monolingual from bilingual children. In this study, bilingual children with Turkish as L1 and German as L2 were compared with monolingual German-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and monolingual German-speaking children with TD in order to disentangle effects of limited language input vs. reduced perceptual abilities in the processing of speech and non-speech stimuli. Sensory processing reflected by the T-complex (or from lateral temporal electrode sites) was compared in response to a German vowel and a sine-wave tone in the three groups of children, ages 5 through 6 years. Stimuli were presented while children watched a muted video. Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were time-locked to the vowels and tones. AEPs to the frequent (standard) stimuli within an oddball paradigm were analyzed at the left (T7) and right (T8) temporal electrode sites.The results revealed language status (monolingual, bilingual, and DLD), stimulus (vowel and tone), and language test measures (receptive and expressive) all influenced the T-complex amplitudes. Particularly, the peak amplitude of Ta was modulated by language status and stimulus type. Bilingual children had significantly more negative Ta responses than the monolingual children with TD for both vowels and tones while DLD children differed from TD children only for the vowel stimulus. The amplitude of the T-complex was overall more negative at the left than at the right site. The Na peak latency was longer for the bilingual group than that observed for the two monolingual groups. The Tb latency was shorter for DLD and bilingual groups than that for TD children in the vowel condition, but no such latency difference between DLD and bilingual children was found. We suggest that the attenuated T-complex for bilingual children indicates continued plasticity of the auditory cortex to allow for learning of novel, second-language speech sounds.

Phonetic discrimination, phonological awareness, and pre-literacy skills in Spanish-English dual language preschoolers

The current study explores variation in phonemic representation among Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs, n = 60) who were dominant in English or in Spanish. Children were given a phonetic discrimination task with speech sounds that: 1) occur in English and Spanish, 2) are exclusive to English, and 3) are exclusive to Russian, during Fall (age m = 57 months) and Spring (age m = 62 months, n = 42). In Fall, English-dominant DLLs discriminated more accurately than Spanish-dominant DLLs between English-Spanish phones and English-exclusive phones. Both groups discriminated Russian phones at or close to chance. In Spring, however, groups no longer differed in discriminating English-exclusive phones and both groups discriminated Russian phones above chance. Additionally, joint English-Spanish and English-exclusive phonetic discrimination predicted children's phonological awareness in both groups. Results demonstrate plasticity in early childhood through diverse language exposure and suggest that phonemic representation begins to emerge driven by lexical restructuring.

Often Encountered but Rarely Reported: Challenges in Selecting Language(s) for Intervention in Bi/Multilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

India is a socioculturally and linguistically diverse country. Most often individuals grow up exposed to more than one language. Apart from exposure to native and community languages, there is a growing preference for English as the language of formal education and employment. Previous studies demonstrated that bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develop language similar to their monolingual nonverbal IQ-matched ASD peers. However, most of these studies have been conducted in countries in which English is the primary language for majority of the population. Although existing studies support a bilingual environment for children with ASD, professionals still seem to advise families' use of a monolingual approach. This paper reviews and discusses factors that influence the selection of language(s) for intervention in young children with ASD in bi/multilingual environments. These are discussed under three areas namely, (1) language environment of the child, (2) parent/caregivers' perspectives regarding bi/multilingual exposure, and (3) medium of education and availability of intervention services. This paper also highlights the complexities involved in the language selection process for intervention using four case vignettes. Based on the review and findings from the case vignettes, it is evident that there is a need for (1) sensitizing fellow professionals regarding the increasing shift toward a bi/multilingual approach, (2) formulating guidelines for this decision-making process, and (3) continuing to develop an evidence base for adopting multilingual approach for intervention in a socioculturally and linguistically diverse country like India.

P-MMR and LDN beside MMN as Speech-evoked Neural Markers in Children with Cochlear Implants: A Review

This review mainly explores less-reported neural markers to speech-evoked contrasts in children with cochlear implants (CI). Databases and electronic journals were searched with keywords of "mismatch responses" AND "positive mismatch response" (p-MMR) AND "late discriminate negativity" (LDN). P-MMR likely is as a measurement of brain immaturity in CI children while the developmental trajectories of LDN remain unexplained in older CI children. In CI children, there is a p-MMR-MMN-LDN sequence to speech stimuli developmentally. Whereas these aforementioned neural responses anticipate developmental changes in CI groups, it is still uncertain about the cutoff age for disappearance of p-MMR and LDN.

The Effects of Age, Dosage, and Poverty on Second Language Learning through SparkLingTM in Infant Education Centers in Madrid, Spain

The first 1000 days represent a unique window of opportunity for second language learning. In two recent studies we demonstrated that Spanish infants’ use of second-language (L2) English productive vocabulary and early utterances rapidly increased through the play-based, interactive and highly social SparkLing^TM Intervention, which consists of an evidence-based method and curriculum stemming from decades of research on infant language development. Analyzing an expanded and more diverse sample of Spanish infants (n = 414; age 9–33 months) who received the SparkLing^TM Intervention, this study examines the variability in L2 production, which was assessed via first-person LENA audio recordings. Infants’ age significantly and positively correlated with L2 production, demonstrating an advantage for older infants in the sample. While overall socioeconomic status (SES) was not related to L2 production, very young infants (under two years) who lived in high poverty homes showed faster increases in English production compared to peers who lived in moderate poverty homes. Infants’ attendance in the program (“dosage”) was also predictive of their L2 production outcomes. Infants across SES have the capacity to begin acquiring two languages in early education classrooms with SparkLing^TM through one-hour/day sessions in social environments that engages them through frequent high-quality language input.

Input quality and speech perception development in bilingual infants' first year of life

Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72 male; 59 female; from white middle-class background) were investigated. Bilingualism did not affect the developmental trajectory of infants' native and non-native speech perception and the quality of maternal speech. In both language groups, vowel exaggeration in IDS was significantly related to speech perception skills for 9-month-olds (r = -.30), but not for 5-month-olds. This demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual caregivers provide their infants with speech input that assists their task of learning the phonological inventory of one or two languages.

The effect of lexical status on prosodic processing in infants learning a fixed stress language

In speech processing, in the first year of life, prosody and phoneme-relevant aspects serve different functions. Recent studies have assumed that the two aspects become integrated at around 9 months of age. The present study investigates the effect of lexical status on stress processing in a fixed stress language. We hypothesize that lexicality modulates stress processing, and where the stress cue is in conflict with the lexical status (legal deviant condition), we will observe differences in age indicating the stage of integration. We tested 69 6 and 10 month-old infants in an acoustic oddball event-related potential paradigm. A frequent word stimulus (baba) and a pseudoword (bebe) were used with legal versus illegal stress. We systematically swapped the standard and deviant roles of the different stress variants in two conditions. In the illegal deviant condition in the case of the word stimulus, the response pattern typical for the pseudoword (an MMR to the absence of the stress cue) was missing. This implies the suppression effect of lexicality. In the legal deviant condition, negative MMR (N-MMR) in the second time window indicated a facilitation effect of lexicality in both age groups. As only the 6-month-olds produced an N-MMR in the first time window, we concluded that in a fixed stress language, integration starts at 6 months but is only completed by the age of 10 months. Our results show that lexical status modulates stress processing at word level in a highly regularly stressed language in which stable, long-term language-specific stress representation exists from early infancy.

The Impact of Family Environment on Language Development of Children With Cochlear Implants: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

OBJECTIVES

The authors conducted a systematic review of the literature and meta-analyses to assess the influence of family environment on language development in children with cochlear implants.

DESIGN

The Pubmed, excerpta medica dataBASE (EMBASE), Education Research Information Center, cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature (CINAHL), Healthcare Literature Information Network, PubPsych, and Social SciSearch databases were searched. The search strategy included terms describing family environment, child characteristics, and language development. Studies were included that (a) assessed distal family variables (such as parental income level, parental education, family size, and parental stress) with child language outcomes, and/or more proximal correlates that directly affect the child (such as family engagement and participation in intervention, parenting style, and more specifically, the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input) on child language; (b) included children implanted before the age of 5 years; (c) measured child language before the age of 21 years with standardized instruments; (d) were published between 1995 and February 2018; and (e) were published as peer-reviewed articles. The methodological quality was assessed with an adaptation of a previously validated checklist. Meta-analyses were conducted assuming a random-effects model.

RESULTS

A total of 22 study populations reported in 27 publications were included. Methodological quality was highly variable. Ten studies had a longitudinal design. Three meta-analyses on the correlations between family variables and child language development could be performed. A strong effect of the quality and quantity of parental linguistic input in the first 4½ years postimplantation on the child's language was found, r = 0.564, p ≤ 0.001, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.449 to 0.660, accounting for 31.7% of the variance in child language outcomes. Results demonstrated high homogeneity, Q(3) = 1.823, p = 0.61, I = 0. Higher-level facilitative language techniques, such as parental expansions of the child's utterances or the use of open-ended questions, predicted child language skills. Risk of publication bias was not detected. The results on the impact of family involvement/participation in intervention on child language development were more heterogeneous. The meta-analysis included mainly cross-sectional studies and identified low to moderate benefits, r = 0.380, p ≤ 0.052, 95% CI = -0.004 to 0.667, that almost attained significance level. Socioeconomic status, mainly operationalized by parental level of education, showed a positive correlation with child language development in most studies. The meta-analysis confirmed an overall low and nonsignificant average correlation coefficient, r = 0.117, p = 0.262, 95% CI = -0.087 to 0.312. A limitation of the study was the lack of some potentially relevant variables, such as multilingualism or family screen time.

CONCLUSIONS

These data support the hypothesis that parental linguistic input during the first years after cochlear implantation strongly predicts later child language outcomes. Effects of parental involvement in intervention and parental education are comparatively weaker and more heterogeneous. These findings underscore the need for early-intervention programs for children with cochlear implants focusing on providing support to parents for them to increase their children's exposure to high-quality conversation.

Deficits in Processing of Lexical Tones in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Electrophysiological Evidence

Purpose This study explored the neural marker indexing deficits in discriminating lexical tone changes in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) using mismatch negativity, an event-related potential component for auditory change detection. Mandarin has four lexical tones characterized by a high-level tone (T1), high-rising tone (T2), low-dipping tone (T3), and high-falling tone (T4), in which the T2/T3 contrast is acoustically less discriminable in developmental groups. Therefore, this study further examined how deficits in children with DLD would vary with tonal contrasts' acoustic saliency. Method Event-related potentials were measured using the multideviant oddball paradigm described by Lee et al. (2012), who used Mandarin syllables [i] in T3 as the standard sound (80%), T1 as the large deviant (10%), and T2 as the small deviant (10%). Twelve children with DLD aged between 4 and 6 years participated in this study, and 12 age-matched children with typical development were selected from the data set of Lee et al. (2012) as the controls. Results The T1/T3 change elicited adultlike mismatch negativity in both the DLD and control groups, while no group difference was revealed. The T2/T3 change elicited a robust positive mismatch response (P-MMR) in children with DLD, while the P-MMR was less significant in the control group. The group comparisons revealed a larger P-MMR in children with DLD than in the control group. Furthermore, children with lower scores in language assessments tend to reveal larger P-MMRs. Conclusions This study demonstrated that deficits in children with DLD in discriminating subtle lexical tone changes reflect greater positivity of P-MMR to T2/T3 change. This implies that MMR to T2/T3 may serve as a neural marker for evaluating language delay in preschoolers.

The Longitudinal Relationship Between Conversational Turn-Taking and Vocabulary Growth in Early Language Development

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months provided several indices of the language environment, including the number of adult words children heard in their environment and their number of conversational turns. Vocabulary was measured independently via parental report. Growth curve analyses revealed a bidirectional relationship between conversational turns and vocabulary growth, controlling for the amount of words in children's environments. The results are consistent with theoretical approaches that identify social interaction as a core component of early language acquisition.

Language learning as a function of infant directed speech (IDS) in Spanish: Testing neural commitment using the positive-MMR

Spanish-English bilingual families (N = 17) were recruited to assess the association between infant directed speech (IDS) in Spanish and their degree of neural commitment to the Spanish language. IDS was assessed by extracting the caregivers' Vowel Space Area (VSA) from recordings of a storybook reading task done at home. Infants' neural commitment was assessed by extracting the positive mismatch brain response (positive-MMR), an Event-Related Potential (ERP) thought to be indicative of higher attentional processes and early language commitment. A linear mixed model analysis demonstrated that caregivers' VSA predicted the amplitude of the positive-MMR in response to a native speech contrast (Spanish), but not to a non-native speech contrast (Chinese), even after holding other predictors constant (i.e., socioeconomic status, infants' age, and fundamental frequency). Our findings provide support to the view that quality of language exposure fosters language learning, and that this beneficial relationship expands to the bilingual population.

A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 385 monolingual infants' preference for North-American English IDS (cf. ManyBabies Consortium, 2020: ManyBabies 1), tested in 17 labs in 7 countries. Those infants were tested in two age groups: 6-9 months (the younger sample) and 12-15 months (the older sample). We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, amongst bilingual infants who were acquiring North-American English (NAE) as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference, extending the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes a similar contribution to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments.

Severe respiratory disease caused by human respiratory syncytial virus impairs language learning during early infancy

Human respiratory syncytial virus infection is a leading cause of pediatric morbidity and mortality. A previous murine study showed that during severe acute respiratory infections the virus invades the central nervous system, and that infected animals evolve with long-lasting learning difficulties associated with long-term potentiation impairment in their hippocampus. We hypothesized here that human infants who presented a severe episode of respiratory syncytial virus infection before 6 months of age would develop long-term learning difficulties. We measured the acquisition of the native phoneme repertoire during the first year, a milestone in early human development, comprising a reduction in the sensitivity to the irrelevant nonnative phonetic information and an increase in the sensitivity to the information relevant for the native one. We found that infants with a history of severe respiratory infection by the human respiratory syncytial virus presented poor distinction of native and nonnative phonetic contrasts at 6 months of age, and remained atypically sensitive to nonnative contrasts at 12 months, which associated with weak communicative abilities. Our results uncover previously unknown long-term language learning difficulties associated with a single episode of severe respiratory infection by the human respiratory syncytial virus, which could relate to memory impairments.

Body representation in infants: Categorical boundaries of body parts as assessed by somatosensory mismatch negativity

There is growing interest in developing and using novel measures to assess how the body is represented in human infancy. Various lines of evidence with adults and older children show that tactile perception is modulated by a high-level representation of the body. For instance, the distance between two points of tactile stimulation is perceived as being greater when these points cross a joint boundary than when they are within a body part, suggesting that the representation of the body is structured with joints acting as categorical boundaries between body parts. Investigating the developmental origins of this categorical effect has been constrained by infants’ inability to verbally report on the properties of tactile stimulation. Here we made novel use of an infant brain measure, the somatosensory mismatch negativity (sMMN), to explore categorical aspects of tactile body processing in infants aged 6–7 months. Amplitude of the sMMN elicited by tactile stimuli across the wrist boundary was significantly greater than for stimuli of equal distance that were within the boundary, suggesting a categorical effect in body processing in infants. We suggest that an early-appearing, structured representation of the body into ‘parts’ may play a role in mapping correspondences between self and other.

Neural Indices of Vowel Discrimination in Monolingual and Bilingual Infants and Children

OBJECTIVES

To examine maturation of neural discriminative responses to an English vowel contrast from infancy to 4 years of age and to determine how biological factors (age and sex) and an experiential factor (amount of Spanish versus English input) modulate neural discrimination of speech.

DESIGN

Event-related potential (ERP) mismatch responses (MMRs) were used as indices of discrimination of the American English vowels [ε] versus [I] in infants and children between 3 months and 47 months of age. A total of 168 longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets were collected from 98 children (Bilingual Spanish-English: 47 male and 31 female sessions; Monolingual English: 48 male and 42 female sessions). Language exposure and other language measures were collected. ERP responses were examined in an early time window (160 to 360 msec, early MMR [eMMR]) and late time window (400 to 600 msec, late MMR).

RESULTS

The eMMR became more negative with increasing age. Language experience and sex also influenced the amplitude of the eMMR. Specifically, bilingual children, especially bilingual females, showed more negative eMMR compared with monolingual children and with males. However, the subset of bilingual children with more exposure to English than Spanish compared with those with more exposure to Spanish than English (as reported by caretakers) showed similar amplitude of the eMMR to their monolingual peers. Age was the only factor that influenced the amplitude of the late MMR. More negative late MMR was observed in older children with no difference found between bilingual and monolingual groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Consistent with previous studies, our findings revealed that biological factors (age and sex) and language experience modulated the amplitude of the eMMR in young children. The early negative MMR is likely to be the mismatch negativity found in older children and adults. In contrast, the late MMR amplitude was influenced only by age and may be equivalent to the Nc in infants and to the late negativity observed in some auditory passive oddball designs.

Influences of the early family environment and long-term vocabulary development on the structure of white matter pathways: A longitudinal investigation

In the present longitudinal study, we investigated the joint effect of early family factors and long-term vocabulary development on the structure of reading-related white matter pathways in adolescents. Seventy-nine children participated in this study. Family environment was measured via parental questionnaire between age 1 and age 3. From age 4 to age 10, children's vocabulary skills were tested annually. At age 14, diffusion tensor imaging data of the children were collected. Using individual-based tractography, 10 reading-related tracts of the two hemispheres were delineated. Different family factors were found to be correlated with different pathways: Age of literacy exposure was correlated with fractional anisotropy of the direct segment of the left arcuate fasciculus, while an association trend was found between early family socioeconomic status and fractional anisotropy of the left inferior frontal occipital fasciculus. Further regression analyses showed that the age of literacy exposure modulated the relationships between vocabulary development and the structure of the left arcuate fasciculus. Specifically, in the earlier literacy exposure group, no association was found between vocabulary development and the strength of the arcuate fasciculus, whereas in the later literacy exposure group, significant associations were found between vocabulary development and the strength of the arcuate fasciculus.

Socioeconomic and experiential influences on the neurobiology of language development

PURPOSE

The process by which young children acquire language is an incredible feat subserved by neurobiological language circuitry. While the foundations of brain structure and function are genetically determined, children's experiences during sensitive periods in early life have a significant influence on the development of language systems. The purpose of this review is to provide practitioners with a comprehensive summary of foundational and recent research on the ways that children's early experiences-both favorable and adverse-may influence the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology underlying language development. A specific focus is given to the burgeoning neuroimaging evidence of relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain development, as well as to emerging research on proximal experiences that may serve as the direct mechanisms by which SES influences language development.

CONCLUSION

Findings from the neuroscience field have direct implications for practice in speech language pathology. Specifically, clinicians can have immense influence on crafting supportive language environments during windows of maximal neural influence, both via direct intervention and parent coaching. Practical suggestions are provided for translating research findings to practice.

The current standing of bilingualism in today's globalized world: a socio-ecological perspective

Globalization has made interactions between individuals from different cultures and languages unavoidable. Therefore, questions concerning bilingualism have become increasingly important within the scholarly community. In this paper, we review this emerging research using a socio-ecological approach. We first present evidence that demonstrates how learning two languages is dependent upon the socio-ecologies of individuals. Second, we review studies that show how bilingualism promotes a myriad of positive social advantages. Then we discuss how the positive effects of bilingualism has affected the socio-ecologies of the individuals. Our discussion sheds light on the challenges that caregivers, educators, scientists, and policy makers face to promote bilingualism in today's globalized world. WC=106/150.

Reliability of the Language Environment Analysis Recording System in Analyzing French-English Bilingual Speech

Purpose This study examined the utility of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recording system for investigating the language input to bilingual infants. Method Twenty-one French-English bilingual families with a 10-month-old infant participated in this study. Using the LENA recording system, each family contributed 3 full days of recordings within a 1-month period. A portion of these recordings (945 minutes) were manually transcribed, and the word counts from these transcriptions were compared against the LENA-generated adult word counts. Results Data analyses reveal that the LENA algorithms were reliable in counting words in both Canadian English and Canadian French, even when both languages are present in the same recording. While the LENA system tended to underestimate the amount of speech in the recordings, there was a strong correlation between the LENA-generated and human-transcribed adult word counts for each language. Importantly, this relationship holds when accounting for different-gendered and different-accented speech. Conclusions The LENA recording system is a reliable tool for estimating word counts, even for bilingual input. Special considerations and limitations for using the LENA recording system in a bilingual population are discussed. These results open up possibilities for investigating caregiver talk to bilingual infants in more detail.

Elevated physiological arousal is associated with larger but more variable neural responses to small acoustic change in children during a passive auditory attention task

Little is known of how autonomic arousal relates to neural responsiveness during auditory attention. We presented N = 21 5-7-year-old children with an oddball auditory mismatch paradigm, whilst concurrently measuring heart rate fluctuations. Children with higher mean autonomic arousal, as indexed by higher heart rate (HR) and decreased high-frequency (0.15-0.8 Hz) variability in HR, showed smaller amplitude N250 responses to frequently presented (70%), 500 Hz standard tones. Follow-up analyses showed that the modal evoked response was in fact similar, but accompanied by more large and small amplitude responses and greater variability in peak latency in the high HR group, causing lower averaged responses. Similar patterns were also observed when examining heart rate fluctuations within a testing session, in an analysis that controlled for between-participant differences in mean HR. In addition, we observed larger P150/P3a amplitudes in response to small acoustic contrasts (750 Hz tones) in the high HR group. Responses to large acoustic contrasts (bursts of white noise), however, evoked strong early P3a phase in all children and did not differ by high/low HR. Our findings suggest that elevated physiological arousal may be associated with high variability in auditory ERP responses in young children, along with increased responsiveness to small acoustic changes.

Neural Underpinnings of Early Speech Perception and Emergent Literacy

Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential component used to index automatic auditory change detection. Thus, MMN provides an excellent tool to assess the speech sensitivity of infants and children. Although MMN is well established in adults, the polarity and latency of mismatch responses (MMRs) in infants are highly inconsistent across studies. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of MMN studies of speech perception in early infancy. In particular, data from a series of MMN studies of Mandarin lexical tone, vowels, and initial consonants will be presented to demonstrate how phonological saliency, size of deviance, and neural maturation modulate MMRs in early infancy. These data suggest that MMN and positive MMRs index different functional characteristics and may provide information on when and how children's speech perception becomes automatic at different developmental stages. By using MMN to index sensitivity to speech discrimination, dyslexic children usually show reduced or absent MMN, which supports the relationship between phonological sensitivity and literacy. However, children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder showed the typical MMN, but attenuated P3a and enhanced late discriminative negativity. Taken together, the MMR characteristics, including amplitude, peak latency, and the transition of polarity, may be used to index the maturation of speech development and for the early identification of children with atypical language development.

No laughing matter: Latinas' high quality of conversations relate to behavioral laughter

Latinx in the United States have greater life expectancy than other groups, in spite of their socioeconomic and psychosocial disadvantage. This phenomenon has been described as the Latinx health paradox. This investigation observed the interplay of cultural processes and social networks to shed light on this paradox. Latina (N = 26) and White-European (N = 24) mothers wore a digital recorder as they went about their daily lives. Four conversation styles were characterized from the recordings to measure the mothers' quality of their conversations (small talk and substantive conversations) within different social networks (with the father vs. other adults). As a positive indicator of well-being, laughter was assessed during the conversations. Results demonstrated that Latina mothers tend to laugh more than White-European mothers; and that this relation is mediated by substantive conversations with others. This suggests that Latinas' cultural processes afford meaningful conversations, which relates to more behavioral laughter, a process that may have positive implications on well-being.

Amount of speech exposure predicts vowel perception in four- to eight-month-olds

During the first year of life, infants shift their focus in speech perception from acoustic to linguistic information. This perceptual reorganization is related to exposure, and a direct relation has previously been demonstrated between amount of daily language exposure and mismatch response (MMR) amplitude to a native consonant contrast at around one year of age. The present study investigates the same relation between amount of speech exposure and MMR amplitude to a native vowel contrast at four to eight months of age. Importantly, the present study uses spectrally rotated speech in an effort to take general neural maturation into account. The amplitude of the part of the MMR that is tied specifically to speech processing correlates with amount of daily speech exposure, as estimated using the LENA system.

Socioeconomic Disparities in Language Input Are Associated With Children's Language-Related Brain Structure and Reading Skills

The mechanisms underlying socioeconomic disparities in children's reading skills are not well understood. This study examined associations among socioeconomic background, home linguistic input, brain structure, and reading skills in 5-to-9-year-old children (N = 94). Naturalistic home audio recordings and high-resolution, T1-weighted MRI scans were acquired. Children who experienced more adult-child conversational turns or adult words had greater left perisylvian cortical surface area. Language input mediated the association between parental education and left perisylvian cortical surface area. Language input was indirectly associated with children's reading skills via left perisylvian surface area. Left perisylvian surface area mediated the association between parental education and children's reading skills. Language experience may thus partially explain socioeconomic disparities in language-supporting brain structure and in turn reading skills.