Mismatch response polarity in infants: Type and magnitude of acoustic change
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1
Institute for Research in Child Development, University of East London, United Kingdom
Inconsistency in mismatch component polarity in infants has been most consistently related to maturational level, though several other factors, such as magnitude of auditory change (difficulty of the contrast) and methodological issues (high-pass filtering) have also been discussed.
The mismatch response (MMR) follows the maturation of obligatory auditory event-related potential (ERP): a broad negativity in preterm and immature newborns turns into a predominantly positive response at the same time as positive ERP components grow during first months of life. The next step in maturation is the development of the N250 during the second half of the first year. Correspondingly, the early negative MMR starts to be observed at the same latency. This early negative discriminative response can be observed even earlier in development in response to a robust spectral change in stimuli, but not to more fine acoustic contrasts (small frequency changes or changes in speech syllables).
Some studies employing very large spectral change (white-noise deviants or harmonic tones with 50 % pitch change) reported early negativity even in newborns.
In this study, the MMRs were elicited in 20-24 month old infants in four experimental conditions: a) large frequency change - harmonic tones, standard 500 Hz FF, deviant 750 Hz; b) small CV change (deviant /ga/ and standard /ka/) c) large duration change (harmonic tones, standard 200 ms, deviant 100 ms) d) control condition.
In the control condition, the 750-Hz ‘deviant’ was presented randomly and equiprobably among two other tones (500 and 625 Hz FF). This was performed in order to compare responses to deviant and to an identical stimulus presented at a comparable presentation rate to avoid adaptation if presented repetitively or orienting if presented against silent background.
The results showed that, the ERP to deviant was significantly more negative than that to standard in response to the large frequency change (F(1,11)=15.64; p<.0023), but more positive to syllable (F(1,11)=10.41; p<.0081) and duration changes (F(1,11)=6.47; p<.0273) within the same latency window (200-300 ms from change onset). There were no significant differences between the N250 amplitude of the frequency deviant and of identical tone presented in a control condition.
This suggests that while the positive MMR appears to be more general response to auditory violation in infants, the fast early negative one (<250 ms) might be specific to large frequency changes irrespective of whether they violate auditory expectations or not and thus, may not represent an adult-like MMN.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
Kushnerenko
E
(2009). Mismatch response polarity in infants: Type and magnitude of acoustic change.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.116
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Received:
26 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
26 Mar 2009.
*
Correspondence:
Elena Kushnerenko, Institute for Research in Child Development, University of East London, London, United Kingdom, .e.kushnerenko@gmail.com