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

Abstract

We examined neural indices of pre-attentive phonological and attentional auditory discrimination in children with developmental language disorder (DLD, n = 23) and typically developing (n = 16) peers from a geographically isolated Russian-speaking population with an elevated prevalence of DLD. Pre-attentive phonological MMN components were robust and did not differ in two groups. Children with DLD showed attenuated P3 and atypically distributed P2 components in the attentional auditory discrimination task; P2 and P3 amplitudes were linked to working memory capacity, development of complex syntax, and vocabulary. The results corroborate findings of reduced processing capacity in DLD and support a multifactorial view of the disorder.

Notes

¹ Although the term most commonly used in the literature to refer to a developmental (rather than acquired) disorder of language development in the absence of obvious explanatory factors is specific language impairment (SLI), we will use the DLD label when referring to this condition to preserve the continuity between the published empirical reports on the unique population that we sampled from (Kornilov, Rakhlin, & Grigorenko, 2012; Rakhlin, Cardoso-Martins, Kornilov, & Grigorenko, 2013a; Rakhlin, Kornilov, & Grigorenko, 2014; Rakhlin et al., 2013b; Rakhlin et al., 2011) with an understanding that it is similar to the categories of expressive and mixed expressive-receptive language disorders in the DSM-IV-TR and the category of language disorder in DSM-V. We would like to emphasize that all of the children classified, as DLD in this study would satisfy the conventionally used inclusion and exclusion criteria for SLI.

² We will refer to as phonological all speech stimuli used in these studies, although in some of them the experimental manipulations were not phonological in nature (but, for example, acoustic).

³ In oddball paradigms, this is a neural response to rare relevant target stimuli with a prominent parietocentral topography, also known as P3b (Kok, 2001).

⁴ For both experiments, the cell means (M and SE) and the summaries of fixed effects for each ERP are available in the Supplemental Material. For Experiment 1, due to a technical issue, we did not acquire EEG data for one child. Given that this data missingness arose from a purely technical issue, the data were considered missing completely at random (MCAR, i.e., the probability of data missinginess did not depend on either observed or unobserved measurements). The exclusion of this child from Experiment 2 dataset did not change the pattern of the results. Here, we report the results of the analyses of Experiment 1 data based on n = 38 (see descriptive statistics for the sample in the Supplemental Material) and the analyses of Experiment 2 data based on n = 39 (Table 1).