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Neural tracking of Dutch nursery rhymes: Development and relations with vocabulary outcomes
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Anika van der Klis1, Katharina Menn2, Melis Çetinçelik3, Tineke Snijders2, Caroline Junge1; 1Utrecht University, 2Tilburg University, 3Maastricht University
Speech consists of regularities at different timescales. A recent discovery is that electrophysiological activity aligns to modulations in the speech signal, already during infancy. The degree to which infants exhibit this neural tracking has been linked to their language outcomes at 18 months (Çetinçelik et al., 2023) and 24 months (Menn et al., 2022). This raises several questions: How does neural tracking develop across stress-, syllable-, and phonemic-rates, and is each frequency rate equally predictive of children’s language outcomes? In this large-scale longitudinal EEG study, we examine how neural tracking develops from infancy into early childhood and whether tracking at different rates and ages predicts children’s language outcomes. We used data of the longitudinal YOUth cohort study. We included 2562 children of whom EEG was collected at 5 months, 10 months, and/or 2-4 years of age. Continuous EEG was recorded while children listened to Dutch sung nursery rhymes (3 x 69s). To assess neural tracking, we used speech-brain coherence which reflects the consistency of the phase difference between the audio signal and the EEG signal in Stress (1-3 Hz), Syllable (3-5 Hz), and Phoneme (5-15 Hz) rates of the stimuli. After preprocessing, we included 955 children at 5 months, 1048 children at 10 months, and 795 children at 2-4 years. 750 children completed the receptive vocabulary test (PPVT-III-NL) at 2-4 years. Speech-brain coherence was significantly higher compared to surrogate data in all frequency rates (all p < .001). The linear mixed-effects model showed there was no significant main effect of Age on speech-brain coherence (b = 0.001, p = 0.674). Stress and Syllable frequencies showed larger speech-brain coherence compared to the Phoneme frequency (b = 0.069, p < .001; b = 0.023, p < .001, respectively). There were no significant interactions between Frequency and Age (p > .05), suggesting there were no age-related changes within specific frequency bands either. Lastly, we found a significant two-way interaction between Frequency (Stress) and Vocabulary (b = 0.005, p = 0.049) on speech-brain coherence. The larger children’s receptive vocabulary at 2-4 years, the stronger they tracked the stressed syllable rate of the sung nursery rhymes. This was not dependent on children’s age during tracking. The size of children’s receptive vocabulary positively relates to children’s degree of speech-brain coherence in the stressed syllable rate of sung nursery rhymes. This is in line with earlier research (Menn et al., 2022; Çetinçelik et al., 2023), although we extend this by showing that the relevance of speech-brain coherence in the stressed syllable rate is not age-specific and remains visible from early infancy to early childhood. Across ages, there was more speech-brain coherence in the lower frequency rates than in the faster frequency rates. Counter to our expectations, we did not find any developmental changes in neural tracking across the different frequency bands in this age-span. Together, these findings suggest that up to early childhood, some children’s brain oscillations align more with stressed syllables or prosodic information in the speech stream, which can be linked to their language development.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Speech Perception