Development of neural oscillatory activity in response to speech in children from 4 to 6 years old
Fecha
2020Autor
Ríos-López, Paula
Molinaro, Nicola
Bourguignon, Mathieu
Lallier, Marie
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítem
Ríos-López, P., Molinaro, N., Bourguignon, M., & Lallier, M. (2020). Development of neural oscillatory activity in response to speech in children from 4 to 6 years old. Developmental Science, 23(6). Doi:10.1111/desc.12947
Resumen
Recent neurophysiological theories propose that the cerebral hemispheres collaborate
to resolve the complex temporal nature of speech, such that left-hemisphere (or
bilateral) gamma-band oscillatory activity would specialize in coding information at
fast rates (phonemic information), whereas right-hemisphere delta- and theta-band
activity would code for speech's slow temporal components (syllabic and prosodic
information). Despite the relevance that neural entrainment to speech might have
for reading acquisition and for core speech perception operations such as the perception
of intelligible speech, no study had yet explored its development in young
children. In the current study, speech-brain entrainment was recorded via EEG in a
cohort of children at three different time points since they were 4–5 to 6–7 years
of age. Our results showed that speech-brain entrainment occurred only at delta
frequencies (0.5 Hz) at all testing times. The fact that, from the longitudinal perspective,
coherence increased in bilateral temporal electrodes suggests that, contrary to
previous hypotheses claiming for an innate right-hemispheric bias for processing prosodic
information, at 7 years of age the low-frequency components of speech are
processed in a bilateral manner. Lastly, delta speech-brain entrainment in the right
hemisphere was related to an indirect measure of intelligibility, providing preliminary
evidence that the entrainment phenomenon might support core linguistic operations
since early childhood.