Linnavalli Tanja, Putkinen Vesa, Huotilainen Minna, Tervaniemi Mari
Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Cicero Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Front Neurosci. 2018 Nov 6;12:814. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00814. eCollection 2018.
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.
5至6岁儿童听觉辨别能力的成熟——以听觉事件相关电位（ERP）的发展为指标——此前尚未在纵向研究中得到探讨。我们首次在此展示基于从75名儿童收集的大量数据集得出的结果。我们对5至6岁儿童进行了20个月的跟踪，并使用相同的多特征范式和音素刺激对他们进行了4次ERP测量。在此期间，对于元音、元音时长和频率变化，失配负波（MMN）反应的幅度增加。此外，对于元音、强度和频率偏差刺激，P3a成分开始向类似成人的正向发展成熟，而对于元音和强度偏差刺激，晚期辨别负波（LDN）成分随年龄增长而降低。这些成分的所有变化似乎都发生在第二个随访年，即芬兰儿童在7岁上学前学习字母符号和其他初步学术技能的时候。因此，需要进一步研究来阐明这些听觉辨别能力的变化是纯粹与年龄相关，还是由于儿童语言知识的增加。
