Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders (CCD), Sydney, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2020 Jul 2;10(1):10849. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-67407-6.
In conditions such as minimally-verbal autism, standard assessments of language comprehension are often unreliable. Given the known heterogeneity within the autistic population, it is crucial to design tests of semantic comprehension that are sensitive in individuals. Recent efforts to develop neural signals of language comprehension have focused on the N400, a robust marker of lexical-semantic violation at the group level. However, homogeneity of response in individual neurotypical children has not been established. Here, we presented 20 neurotypical children with congruent and incongruent visual animations and spoken sentences while measuring their neural response using electroencephalography (EEG). Despite robust group-level responses, we found high inter-individual variability in response to lexico-semantic anomalies. To overcome this, we analysed our data using temporally and spatially unconstrained multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA), supplemented by descriptive analyses to examine the timecourse, topography, and strength of the effect. Our results show that neurotypical children exhibit heterogenous responses to lexical-semantic violation, implying that any application to heterogenous disorders such as autism spectrum disorder will require individual-subject analyses that are robust to variation in topology and timecourse of neural responses.
在类似于轻度自闭症的情况下，语言理解的标准评估通常不可靠。鉴于自闭症人群中存在的已知异质性，设计出对个体敏感的语义理解测试至关重要。最近，开发语言理解的神经信号的努力集中在 N400 上，这是群体水平上词汇语义违反的一个强大标志物。然而，个体神经典型儿童的反应同质性尚未得到证实。在这里，我们向 20 名神经典型儿童展示了一致和不一致的视觉动画和口语句子，同时使用脑电图 (EEG) 测量他们的神经反应。尽管存在强大的组级反应，但我们发现对词汇语义异常的反应存在高度的个体间可变性。为了克服这一点，我们使用不受时间和空间限制的多变量模式分析 (MVPA) 分析了我们的数据，并辅以描述性分析来检查时间过程、地形和效应的强度。我们的结果表明，神经典型儿童对词汇语义违反表现出异质的反应，这意味着任何对自闭症谱系障碍等异质障碍的应用都需要对个体进行分析，这些分析要能够抵抗神经反应的拓扑和时间过程的变化。
