Infant Event-Related Potentials to Speech are Associated with Prelinguistic Development
Highlights • Speech processing and prelinguistic skills studied in a large longitudinal sample. • Auditory ERPs predicted prelinguistic development in infancy in LCS models. • P1 amplitude at 6 months predicted prelinguistic development between 6 and 12 months. • MMR to a frequency change was associated with prelinguistic skills at 6 months. • Infants’ neural speech processing can help to predict early language development.
An extensive pattern of atypical neural speech-sound discrimination in newborns at risk of dyslexia.
Objective: Identifying early signs of developmental dyslexia, associated with deficient speech-sound processing, is paramount to establish early interventions. We aimed to find early speech-sound processing deficiencies in dyslexia, expecting diminished and atypically lateralized event-related potentials (ERP) and mismatch responses (MMR) in newborns at dyslexia risk. Methods: ERPs were recorded to a pseudoword and its variants (vowel-duration, vowel-identity, and syllable-frequency changes) from 88 newborns at high or no familial risk. The response significance was tested, and group, laterality, and frontality effects were assessed with repeated-measures ANOVA. Results: An early positive a…
Musicianship can be decoded from magnetic resonance images
AbstractLearning induces structural changes in the brain. Especially repeated, long-term behaviors, such as extensive training of playing a musical instrument, are likely to produce characteristic features to brain structure. However, it is not clear to what extent such structural features can be extracted from magnetic resonance images of the brain. Here we show that it is possible to predict whether a person is a musician or a non-musician based on the thickness of the cerebral cortex measured at 148 brain regions en-compassing the whole cortex. Using a supervised machine-learning technique, we achieved a significant (κ = 0.321, p < 0.001) agreement between the actual and predicted par…