Browsing by Subject "äänteiden prosessointi"

Objectives. The aim of the current study was to explore whether there is an association between phonological processing and neural auditory discrimination in 5–6-years-old children. Phonological processing is defined by the ability to recognize and modulate small units of words, like phonemes. Neural auditory discrimination is defined by brain's automatic and preconscious ability to discriminate changes in auditory stimuli. Both phonological processing and neural auditory discrimination are important factors in the language development and deficits in those factors are known to be related to many language impairments. Single studies have reported an association between phonological processing and neural auditory discrimination but this theme is not well studied. In addition to group differences, we also studied differences in the ability to discriminate different sound deviants. Methods. The sample consisted of 38 children, whose mean age was 5 years and 10 months. The study was executed by dividing children into two groups by Nepsy-II phonological processing scores and comparing these two groups with the amplitudes of the brain's mismatch negativities (MMN) and late discriminative negativities (LDN). The comparison was made with repeated measures analysis of variance. Brain's event-related potentials were recorded with multifeature-paradigm in which the stimuli were modulated by vowel, consonant, duration of the vowel, intensity and frequency. Results and conclusions. The results of this current study demonstrate that differences in the phonological processing can be seen in the neural auditory discrimination. Both MMN- and LDN-potentials were stronger in those children, whose ability to process phonemes was better. In MMN-potentials the group difference was only seen in frequency, vowel and consonant deviants, whereas in LDN-potentials group differences were seen across all deviant types. In this study the phonological processing seems to be associated particularly to stronger LDN-potentials, which can provide information about the cognitive processes related to LDN-potentials. No previous studies about the association between phonological processing and LDN-potentials are known to be done.