Pérez-Navarro, J. J. , Molinaro, N. & Lallier, M.
BCBL
SLI is ?a significant limitation in receptive and/or expressive language skills in the context of typical cognitive development? (Heim et al., 2011) which can impact essential aspects of life (i.e., social and academic skills.) While there is a growing consensus on the linguistic symptoms of children with SLI, less is known about the neural correlates of these deficits.
Researchers are increasingly focusing on the neural oscillations as potential underpinnings of speech processing. It has been shown that slow neural oscillations in response to speech can serve as a chunking mechanism to sample finer-grain phonemic units (Goswami, 2011) and that neural entrainment to auditory stimuli at slow frequencies can result in impaired brain to speech synchronization thought to hinder the phonemic sampling of speech in dyslexia, a developmental language disorder associated with phonological difficulties (Lehongre et al., 2011; Molinaro et al., 2016).
Aims: to identify linguistic markers of SLI linked to brain oscillatory activity in response to speech, and the evolution of those markers and their neural underpinnings along the 3 years of this longitudinal study. We also want to explore whether the potential neural oscillatory impairment is similar to the one observed in other populations with phonological deficits such as dyslexic individuals. Lastly, we seek to identify the oscillatory correlates of non-phonological deficits associated with SLI.
To reach our objectives, we will run two experiments: 1st study, children?s cortical activity is recorded through electroencephalography (EEG) while they listen to continuous speech stimuli. 2nd study, children listen to white noise with frequency modulations that are related to relevant speech information (i.e., white-noises at 4 Hz -theta- corresponding to syllabic-rate fluctuations).
This is an ongoing project, so we have only collected behavioral/cognitive data. Expected results regarding oscillatory cortical activity and its link with the main goals of the study will be presented.