The nature of auditory discrimination problems in children with specific language impairment: An MMN study

Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show impairments in discriminating auditorily presented stimuli. The present study investigates whether these discrimination problems are speech specific or of a general auditory nature. This was studied using a linguistic and nonlinguistic contrast that were matched for acoustic complexity in an active behavioral task and a passive ERP paradigm, known to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN). In addition, attention skills and a variety of language skills were measured. Participants were 25 five-year-old Dutch children with SLI having receptive as well as productive language problems and 25 control children with typical speech- and language development. At the behavioral level, the SLI group was impaired in discriminating the linguistic contrast as compared to the control group, while both groups were unable to distinguish the non-linguistic contrast. Moreover, the SLI group tended to have impaired attention skills which correlated with performance on most of the language tests. At the neural level, the SLI group, in contrast to the control group, did not show an MMN in response to either the linguistic or nonlinguistic contrast. The MMN data are consistent with an account that relates the symptoms in children with SLI to non-speech processing difficulties.

Research highlights▶ The nature of discrimination problems was studied in children with SLI. ▶ Equally acoustically complex speech and non-speech contrasts were used. ▶ At the behavioral level, the SLI group was impaired in speech discrimination. ▶ The SLI group did not show MMNs to speech and non-speech contrasts. ▶ Neural evidence for general non-speech processing problems in children with SLI.