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

Specific Language Impairment 80
(Benasich & Tallal, 2002). Children with SLI seem delayed in their auditory development,
since they performed like 4 years younger children with TLD in an auditory
masking task (cf. Bishop & McArthur, 2004).
Bishop et al. (2005) compared children with SLI and TLD in an auditory discrimination
task with a speech (discriminating minimal word pairs with background silence or
noise) and a non-speech part (detecting the direction of frequency glides). While control
and SLI groups did not differ on the glide tasks, a small but significant group difference
was observed in the speech-in-noise task whose scores were weakly related to literacy
level. McArthur and Bishop (2004; Bishop & McArthur, 2004) proposed a delayed
development of the auditory cortex may be responsible for the difficulties of SLI children.
They demonstrate age-inappropriate auditory ERP components in SLI children
that, moreover, reached an adult-like appearance much later in development. Gilley,
Sharma, Dorman, and Martin (2006) found different morphological categories of ERP
responses in children with language-based learning problems: While one third had normal
ERP responses, the remaining two thirds formed three atypical categories: [1] delayed
P1 latencies and absent N1/P2 components; [2] typical P1 but delayed N1 and P2
responses; [3] generally low-amplitude responses. However, differences in auditory
perception will not provide an exclusive causal explanation, because children with sensorineural
hearing loss have difficulties in discriminating speech sounds, but may have
relative normal linguistic abilities (Briscoe, Bishop, & Norbury, 2001). Further, the
perceptual deficits in children with SLI can lose their impact whereas the linguistic
deficiencies persist over time (Bernstein & Stark, 1985).
Joanisse and Seidenberg (1998; see also Joannisse & Seidenberg, 2004) assumed that
deficits in basic (auditory) processing will also lead to deficiencies in learning and
memory. The deficits in the linguistic (e.g., the phonological) abilities of SLI children
are considered as secondary to such basic deficits. Perceptual deficits may result in a
lack of some acoustic information consisted in the speech signal. In line with this argumentation,
Weinert (1991, 2000) showed difficulties of SLI children to utilize prosodicrhythmic
properties when segmenting spoken language. For example, quite a lot of
phonological cues are transient (e.g., formant transitions, voice onset time, aspiration,
etc.) and require unimpaired perceptual processing.
At a second processing stage, the extracted information has to be stored and integrated.
A crucial component at this stage is the phonological working memory. There may be
deficiencies in its function such that only a smaller amount of items can be hold in it
(compared to children with TLD). These may be due to less capacity of the store, a
more quickly decay of the representations, or not well-formed representations due to