Prosody perception in children: studying individual differences with novel brain and behavioral approaches

Abstract

A sizeable literature has shown that perception of prosodic elements bolsters speech comprehension across developmental stages; recent work also suggests that variance in musical aptitude predicts individual differences in prosody perception in adults. The current study investigates brain and behavioral methods of assessing prosody perception and tests the relationship with musical rhythm perception in 35 school-aged children (age range: 5;5 to 8;0 years, M = 6;7 years, SD = 10 months; 18 females). We applied stimulus reconstruction, a technique for analyzing EEG data by fitting a temporal response function that maps the neural response back to the sensory stimulus. In doing so, we obtain a measure of neural encoding of the speech envelope in passive listening to continuous narratives. We also present a behavioral prosody assessment that requires holistic judgments of filtered speech. The results from these typically developing children revealed that individual differences in stimulus reconstruction in the delta band, indexing neural synchrony to the speech envelope, are significantly related to individual differences in behavioral measurement of prosody perception. In addition, both of these measures are moderately to strongly correlated with musical rhythm perception skills. Results support a domain-general mechanism for cognitive processing of speech and music. Graphical Abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=150 SRC="FIGDIR/small/281998v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (68K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@7a4ca2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@13d41c6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@a9652borg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@130eb6a_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG