Detection without further processing or processing without automatic detection? Differential ERP responses to lexical-semantic processing in toddlers at high clinical risk for autism and language disorder
| Autor: | Chiara Dondena, Chiara Cantiani, Valentina Riva, Massimo Molteni, Maria Luisa Lorusso, Elena Maria Riboldi |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Cognitive Neuroscience Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Context (language use) Vocabulary 050105 experimental psychology 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Event-related potential medicine Semantic memory Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Language disorder Language Development Disorders Autistic Disorder Late positive component 05 social sciences Infant Language acquisition medicine.disease Semantics Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Autism spectrum disorder Child Preschool Autism Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior. 141 |
| ISSN: | 1973-8102 |
| Popis: | Delays in early expressive vocabulary can reflect a specific delay in language acquisition or more general impairments in social communication. The neural mechanisms underlying the (dis)ability to establish the first lexical–semantic representations remain relatively unknown. Here, we investigate the electrophysiological underpinnings of these mechanisms during the critical phase of lexical acquisition in two groups of 19-month-old toddlers at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, i.e., children characterized by low expressive vocabulary (late talkers, N = 18) and children with early signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, N = 18) as compared to typically developing children (N = 28), with the aim to identify similarities and specificities in lexical-semantic processing between these groups. ERPs elicited by words (either congruous or incongruous with the previous picture context) and pseudo-words are investigated within a picture-word matching paradigm. In order to further interpret ERP responses, we look at longitudinal intra-group associations with language and socio-communications skills at age 24 months. As expected, we found differences between the groups that might underlie specificities, but also similarities. On the one side, late talkers differed from the other two groups in the early component (phonological-lexical priming effect) reflecting detection of the correspondence between the heard word and the lexical representation pre-activated by the picture. On the other side, children with early symptoms of ASD differed from the other two groups in the late component (late positive component) reflecting the effortful semantic re-analysis following a violation. The functional interpretation of the two components is corroborated by significant correlations suggesting that the early component is associated with later socio-communication skills, whereas the late component is associated with linguistic skills. Results point in the direction of differential impaired mechanisms in the two populations, i.e., impaired automatic detection of incongruencies in late talkers vs. absence of high-level re-analysis of such incongruencies in children with early signs of ASD. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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