Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 54
ing that a word is semantically incongruent to the context (the picture). An N400 was
also observed in 30-month-olds when a word is incongruent to its sentential contexts
(Silva Pereyra, Klarman, Lin, & Kuhl, 2005). Children that are at-risk for language
impairment often late acquire their first words. In accordance, Friedrich and Friederici
(2006) demonstrated that the presence of an N400 at 19 months – as an indicator of
intact semantic processing – was associated with later age-adequate expressive language
skills while its absence was linked with later poor expressive language skills.
Later, children start to process phrases and sentences, and begin to acquire syntactic
regularities. Syntactic violations often elicit a biphasic ERP pattern in adults: An ELAN
appears around 200 ms and is taken to reflect early and fairly automatic processes of
initial syntactic structure building. It is usually followed by a P600 that has a higher
latency and is related to processes of syntactic reanalysis and repair. Such an adult-like
ERP response was found in 32 month old children (Oberecker, Friedrich, & Friederici,
2005). In this experiment children were presented with syntactically correct or syntactically
incorrect sentences (with active mode construction). The syntactically incorrect
sentences contained a phrase structure violation (a preposition not followed by a noun
phrase). In younger children only a P600 is found while an ELAN-like response seems
absent (Oberecker & Friederici, 2006 [at 24 months]; Silva Pereyra et al., 2005 [at 30
months]). For syntactically more complex, passive sentences, Hahne, Eckstein and
Friederici (2004) demonstrated a comparable developmental pattern with a P600 that
can be observed even in six-year-olds. Instead of ELAN in children between 7 and 13
years a sustained syntactic negativity (that has a higher latency than the ERAN and a
more sustained time course) was found. It gradually develops into the ELAN which is
usually observed in older children and adults.
Regarding the functional-anatomical organization of infants’ language perception,
Dehaene-Lambertz et al. (2006) provided evidence that 3 month old infants’ language
processing is confined to regions that are similar to those observed in adults in both
their localization and their lateralization. They further investigated the time course of
this processing, and observed the fastest responses in the vicinity of Heschl’s gyrus,
whereas responses became increasingly delayed toward the posterior part of the superior
temporal gyrus (STG), and toward the temporal pole and the inferior frontal regions.
The activity in the inferior frontal region was sensitive to the immediate repetition
of the sentence. Imada et al. (2006) investigated discriminative responses to pure
tones, harmonic tones, and syllables with MEG in neonates, 6-month-old infants, and
12-month-old infants. They found evidence for a contribution of the inferior frontal
cortex to speech-sound discrimination that was present in 6 and 12 month old infants.