The nature of auditory discrimination problems in children with specific language impairment: An MMN study

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:49

Article

Davids, Nina^1,2  Segers, Eliane¹  van den Brink, Danielle^2,3  Mitterer, Holger⁴  van Balkom, Hans¹  Hagoort, Peter^2,4  Verhoeven, Ludo¹ 

[1] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Inst Behav Sci, NL-6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands

[2] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Donders Inst Brain Cognit & Behav, NL-6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands

[3] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Med Ctr, NL-6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands

[4] Max Planck Inst Psycholinguist, Nijmegen, Netherlands

关键词: Mismatch negativity (MMN);    Event-related potential (ERP);    Specific language impairment (SLI);    Phonemic discrimination;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.11.001

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show impairments in discriminating auditorily presented stimuli. The present study investigates whether these discrimination problems are speech specific or of a general auditory nature. This was studied using a linguistic and nonlinguistic contrast that were matched for acoustic complexity in an active behavioral task and a passive ERP paradigm, known to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN). In addition, attention skills and a variety of language skills were measured. Participants were 25 five-year-old Dutch children with SLI having receptive as well as productive language problems and 25 control children with typical speech- and language development. At the behavioral level, the SLI group was impaired in discriminating the linguistic contrast as compared to the control group, while both groups were unable to distinguish the non-linguistic contrast. Moreover, the SLI group tended to have impaired attention skills which correlated with performance on most of the language tests. At the neural level, the SLI group, in contrast to the control group, did not show an MMN in response to either the linguistic or nonlinguistic contrast. The MMN data are consistent with an account that relates the symptoms in children with SLI to non-speech processing difficulties. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free