Abstract
The maturation of 5–6-year-old children’s auditory discrimination – indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) – has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children.
Highlights
Auditory event-related responses are an important tool to investigate auditory cognition and its development beyond behavioral measures
Mean amplitudes for the mismatch negativity (MMN) and the P3a are averaged over F3, Fz, and F4 electrodes and for the late discriminative negativity (LDN) over F3, Fz, F4, C3, Cz, C4, P3, Pz, and P4 electrodes
The variation in children’s individual responses is large, and a lot of information is lost in averaging responses over fixed time window
Summary
Auditory event-related responses are an important tool to investigate auditory cognition and its development beyond behavioral measures. Some components – such as mismatch negativity (MMN) – are known to be evident already in new-born babies, while our knowledge of the emergence of others [e.g., P3a and late discriminative negativity (LDN)] is scarce and even contradictory. The present knowledge on components elicited by changes in the sound stream, namely MMN, P3a and LDN, is briefly presented below. The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a component of event-related responses that is thought to reflect the neural discrimination of change in the stream of repeating stimuli (Näätänen, 1992) or a mismatch between the predicted and perceived acoustic input (Winkler et al, 2009). In adults the MMN is of negative polarity and it is thought to originate from two main areas, namely prefrontal cortex and the supratemporal planes of the auditory cortices (Näätänen and Escera, 2000; Rinne et al, 2000)
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