Neural detection of changes in amplitude rise time in infancy

Abstract

Amplitude rise times play a crucial role in the perception of rhythm in speech, and reduced perceptual sensitivity to differences in rise time is related to developmental language difficulties. Amplitude rise times also play a mechanistic role in neural entrainment to the speech amplitude envelope. Using an ERP paradigm, here we examined for the first time whether infants at the ages of seven and eleven months exhibit an auditory mismatch response to changes in the rise times of simple repeating auditory stimuli. We found that infants exhibited a mismatch response (MMR) to all of the oddball rise times used for the study. The MMR was more positive at seven than eleven months of age. At eleven months, there was a shift to a mismatch negativity (MMN) that was more pronounced over left fronto-central electrodes. The MMR over right fronto-central electrodes was sensitive to the size of the difference in rise time. The results indicate that neural processing of changes in rise time is present at seven months, supporting the possibility that early speech processing is facilitated by neural sensitivity to these important acoustic cues.

A mapping-knowledge-domain analysis of ERP research on language processing

“…Investigations into second language acquisition have begun to identify individual variations by considering between-subject factors such as second language ability ( Bice and Kroll, 2021 ; Liang and Chen, 2022 ; Grey, 2023 ). Furthermore, discussions regarding individual factors like gender or age have gained traction in recent studies ( Cheimariou et al, 2019 ; Choisdealbha et al, 2022 ; Padrón et al, 2023 ).…”

“…The proliferation of studies concentrating on lexical processing established a robust foundation for ERP research on language processing. Consequently, subsequent investigations broadened their scope to encompass varied linguistic materials, highlighted by the emergence of the burst term "sentence comprehension" (2020)(2021)(2022). Beyond lexical-semantic attributes, sentence processing encompasses the integration of diverse linguistic information.…”

Neural processing of rhythmic speech by children with developmental language disorder (DLD): An EEG study

“…Recent infant data support the linguistic predictions made by TS theory. In the Cambridge UK BabyRhythm project, 120 infants were followed longitudinally from the age of 2 months, and EEG was recorded while the infants listened to either sung speech (nursery rhymes), to the rhythmic syllable repetition task, or to a matched drumbeat (nonspeech) rhythmic repetition task (Attaheri et al, 2022a,b; Ni Choisdealbha et al, 2022, 2023; Keshavarzi et al, 2023). In the syllable repetition task, infants showed evidence for a group preferred phase as early as 2 months of age, and by 6 months individual phase consistency was present over both left- and right-temporal regions as well as over parietal-occipital regions (Ni Choisdealbha et al, 2023).…”