Brain-based individual difference measures of reading skill in deaf and hearing adults.

Most deaf children and adults struggle to read, but some deaf individuals do become highly proficient readers. There is disagreement about the specific causes of reading difficulty in the deaf population, and consequently, disagreement about the effectiveness of different strategies for teaching reading to deaf children. Much of the disagreement surrounds the question of whether deaf children read in similar or different ways as hearing children.

Principal component analyses and scalp distribution of the auditory P150-250 and N250-550 to speech contrasts in Mexican and American infants.

We report a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the scalp distribution of the normalized peak amplitude values for speech-related auditory Event-related Potentials (ERP) P150-250 and N250-550 in 7-, 11-, and 20-month-old American infants learning English and in 10-13-month-old Mexican infants learning Spanish. After assessing the infant auditory ERP P-N complex using PCA, we evaluated the topographic distribution of each of the discriminatory phases to native and non-native CV-syllabic contrasts used in Spanish and English. We found that the first two Principal Components for each contrast type across ages showing a maximization of differences between the P150-250 and the N250-550 waves, explain more than 70% of the variance.

Grammatical processing without semantics? An event-related brain potential study of preschoolers using jabberwocky sentences.

Behavioral studies have demonstrated that children develop a nearly adult-like grammar between 36 and 42 months, but few studies have addressed how the child's brain processes semantic versus syntactic information. In previous research, Silva-Pereyra and colleagues showed that distinct event-related potentials (ERPs) are elicited by semantic and syntactic violations in sentences in children as young as 30, 36, and 48 months, following the patterns displayed by adults. In the current study, we examined ERPs to syntactic phrase structure violations in real and jabberwocky sentences in 36-month-old children.

Sentence processing in 30-month-old children: an event-related potential study.

In a previous event-related brain potential study, we provided evidence that preschoolers display different brain electrical patterns to semantic content and syntactic structure processing. In the present study, we aimed to determine the time-course of these event-related potential effects in 30-month-old children, using the same syntactically anomalous, semantically anomalous and control sentences that we used in our previous study. The results show that semantic violations elicit a frontal negativity peaking around 600 ms, whereas the morphosyntactic violations elicit a slow positive shift peaking around 800 ms with a frontocentral distribution.

Neural patterns to speech and vocabulary growth in American infants.

We report infant auditory event-related potentials to native and foreign contrasts. Foreign contrasts are discriminated at 11 months of age, showing significant differences between the standard and deviant over the positive (P150-250), or over the negative (N250-550) part of the waveform. The amplitudes of these deflections have different amplitude scalp distributions.

Dynamics of Word Comprehension in Infancy: Developments in Timing, Accuracy, and Resistance to Acoustic Degradation.

Online comprehension of naturally spoken and perceptually degraded words was assessed in 95 children ages 12 to 31 months. The time course of word recognition was measured by monitoring eye movements as children looked at pictures while listening to familiar target words presented in unaltered, time-compressed, and low-pass-filtered forms. Success in word recognition varied with age and level of vocabulary development, and with the perceptual integrity of the word.