Infancy and early childhood maturation of neural auditory change detection and its associations to familial dyslexia risk

Objective: We investigated early maturation of the infant mismatch response MMR, including mismatch negativity (MMN), positive MMR (P-MMR), and late discriminative negativity (LDN), indexing auditory discrimination abilities, and the influence of familial developmental dyslexia risk. Methods: We recorded MMRs to vowel, duration, and frequency deviants in pseudo-words at 0, 6, and 28 months and compared MMRs in subgroups with vs. without dyslexia risk, in a sample overrepresented by risk infants. Results: Neonatal MMN to the duration deviant became larger and earlier by 28 months; MMN was elicited by more deviants only at 28 months. The P-MMR was predominant in infancy; its amplitude increased by 6 and decreased by 28 months; latency decreased with increasing age. An LDN emerged by 6 months and became larger and later by 28 months. Dyslexia risk affected MMRs and their maturation. Conclusions: MMRs demonstrate an expected maturational pattern with 2-3 peaks by 28 months. The effects of dyslexia risk are prominent but not always as expected. Significance: This large-scale longitudinal study shows MMR maturation with three age groups and three deviants. Results illuminate MMR's relation to the adult responses, and hence their cognitive underpinnings, and help in identifying typical/atypical auditory development in early childhood. (c) 2022 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Peer reviewe

Infancy and early childhood maturation of neural auditory change detection and its associations to familial dyslexia risk

ObjectiveWe investigated early maturation of the infant mismatch response MMR, including mismatch negativity (MMN), positive MMR (P-MMR), and late discriminative negativity (LDN), indexing auditory discrimination abilities, and the influence of familial developmental dyslexia risk.MethodsWe recorded MMRs to vowel, duration, and frequency deviants in pseudo-words at 0, 6, and 28 months and compared MMRs in subgroups with vs. without dyslexia risk, in a sample over-represented by risk infants.ResultsNeonatal MMN to the duration deviant became larger and earlier by 28 months; MMN was elicited by more deviants only at 28 months. The P-MMR was predominant in infancy; its amplitude increased by 6 and decreased by 28 months; latency decreased with increasing age. An LDN emerged by 6 months and became larger and later by 28 months. Dyslexia risk affected MMRs and their maturation.ConclusionsMMRs demonstrate an expected maturational pattern with 2–3 peaks by 28 months. The effects of dyslexia risk are prominent but not always as expected.SignificanceThis large-scale longitudinal study shows MMR maturation with three age groups and three deviants. Results illuminate MMR’s relation to the adult responses, and hence their cognitive underpinnings, and help in identifying typical/atypical auditory development in early childhood.</p

Infant event-related potentials to speech are associated with prelinguistic development

Neural auditory processing and prelinguistic communication build the foundation for later language development, but how these two are associated is not well known. The current study investigated how neural speech processing is associated with the level and development of prelinguistic skills in 102 infants. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 6-months-olds to assess the neural detection of a pseudoword (obligatory responses), as well as the neural discrimination of changes in the pseudoword (mismatch responses, MMRs). Prelinguistic skills were assessed at 6 and 12 months of age with a parental questionnaire (Infant-Toddler Checklist). The association between the ERPs and prelinguistic skills was examined using latent change score models, a method specifically constructed for longitudinal analyses and explicitly modeling intra-individual change. The results show that a large obligatory P1 at 6 months of age predicted strong improvement in prelinguistic skills between 6 and 12 months of age. The MMR to a frequency change was associated with the concurrent level of prelinguistic skills, but not with the improvement of the skills. Overall, our results highlight the strong association between ERPs and prelinguistic skills, possibly offering opportunities for early detection of atypical linguistic and communicative development.Peer reviewe