Event-related brain potentials to change in the frequency and temporal structure of sounds in typically developing 5-6-year-old children.
The brain's ability to recognize different acoustic cues (e.g., frequency changes in rapid temporal succession) is important for speech perception and thus for successful language development. Here we report on distinct event-related potentials (ERPs) in 5-6-year-old children recorded in a passive oddball paradigm to repeated tone pair stimuli with a frequency change in the second tone in the pair, replicating earlier findings. An occasional insertion of a third tone within the tone pair generated a more merged pattern, which has not been reported previously in 5-6-year-old children. Both types of deviations elicited pre-attentive discriminative mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discriminative negativity (LDN) responses. Temporal principal component analysis (tPCA) showed a similar topographical pattern with fronto-central negativity for MMN and LDN. We also found a previously unreported discriminative response complex (P340-N440) at the temporal electrode sites at about 140 ms and 240 ms after the frequency deviance, which we suggest reflects a discriminative processing of frequency change. The P340 response was positive with a clear radial distribution preceding the fronto-central frequency MMN by about 30 ms. The results indicate that 5-6-year-old children can detect frequency change and the occasional insertion of an additional tone in sound pairs as reflected by MMN and LDN, even with quite short within-stimulus intervals (150 ms and 50 ms). Furthermore, MMN for these changes is preceded by another response to deviancy, temporal P340, which seems to reflect a parallel but earlier discriminatory process.
['Ervast|Leena|L|', 'Hämäläinen|Jarmo A|JA|', 'Zachau|Swantje|S|', 'Lohvansuu|Kaisa|K|', 'Heinänen|Kaisu|K|', 'Veijola|Mari|M|', 'Heikkinen|Elisa|E|', 'Suominen|Kalervo|K|', 'Luotonen|Mirja|M|', 'Lehtihalmes|Matti|M|', 'Leppänen|Paavo H T|PH|']
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation D000704:Analysis of Variance D001307:Auditory Perception D001921:Brain D001931:Brain Mapping D002648:Child D002675:Child, Preschool D003265:Contingent Negative Variation D004569:Electroencephalography D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D011930:Reaction Time D013016:Sound
Mismatch negativity (MMN) Late discriminative negativity (LDN) Auditory processing EEG N250 T-complex