Children's brain responses to sound changes in pseudo words in a multifeature paradigm.

Objective: The multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm has previously been used to study MMN responses to changes in tones or isolated syllables. We tested 4-12 year old children's MMNs to changes in a naturally produced pseudo word context.

Methods: We studied preschoolers' (under the age of 7 years, N = 15, mean age 5 years 4 months) and school childrens' (over the age of 7 years, N = 15, mean age 9 years 3 months) MMNs to five types of changes (vowel duration, fundamental frequency, gap, intensity, vowel identity) in the middle syllable of a pseudo word [tɑtɑtɑ] using a multifeature paradigm.

Results: Vowel duration and gap changes elicited larger frontocentral MMN responses than other change types and the vowel identity change also produced an early positive p-MMR. The presence of the MMN was also determined at the individual level, and it was found that vowel duration and gap deviants produced MMNs in most of the participants.

Conclusions: The current study shows that children's neural speech sound discrimination can be assessed in a word context in a short recording time (30 min) by using the multifeature paradigm.

Significance: A paradigm which can be used to investigate the discrimination of several change types of speech-sounds in a natural context can be useful for investigating speech development and deficits.