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This paper includes a detailed description of a familiarization protocol, which is used as an integral component of a larger research protocol to collect electroencephalography (EEG) data and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). At present, the systems available for the collection of high-quality EEG/ERP data make significant demands on children with developmental disabilities, such as those with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Children with ASD may have difficulty adapting to novel situations, tolerating uncomfortable sensory stimuli, and sitting quietly. This familiarization protocol uses Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) to increase research participants' knowledge and understanding of the specific activities and steps of the research protocol. The tools in this familiarization protocol are a social narrative, a visual schedule, the Premack principle, role-playing, and modeling. The goal of this familiarization protocol is to increase understanding and agency and to potentially reduce anxiety for child participants, resulting in a greater likelihood of the successful completion of the research protocol for the collection of EEG/ERP data.
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When a speaker talks, the consequences of this can both be heard (audio) and seen (visual). A novel visual phonemic restoration task was used to assess behavioral discrimination and neural signatures (event-related potentials, or ERP) of audiovisual processing in typically developing children with a range of social and communicative skills assessed using the social responsiveness scale, a measure of traits associated with autism. An auditory oddball design presented two types of stimuli to the listener, a clear exemplar of an auditory consonant-vowel syllable /ba/ (the more frequently occurring standard stimulus), and a syllable in which the auditory cues for the consonant were substantially weakened, creating a stimulus which is more like /a/ (the infrequently presented deviant stimulus). All speech tokens were paired with a face producing /ba/ or a face with a pixelated mouth containing motion but no visual speech. In this paradigm, the visual /ba/ should cause the auditory /a/ to be perceived as /ba/, creating an attenuated oddball response; in contrast, a pixelated video (without articulatory information) should not have this effect. Behaviorally, participants showed visual phonemic restoration (reduced accuracy in detecting deviant /a/) in the presence of a speaking face. In addition, ERPs were observed in both an early time window (N100) and a later time window (P300) that were sensitive to speech context (/ba/ or /a/) and modulated by face context (speaking face with visible articulation or with pixelated mouth). Specifically, the oddball responses for the N100 and P300 were attenuated in the presence of a face producing /ba/ relative to a pixelated face, representing a possible neural correlate of the phonemic restoration effect. Notably, those individuals with more traits associated with autism (yet still in the non-clinical range) had smaller P300 responses overall, regardless of face context, suggesting generally reduced phonemic discrimination.
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Purpose: The toddler years are a critical period for language development and growth. We investigated how event-related potentials (ERPs) to repeated and novel nonwords are associated with clinical assessments of language in young children. In addition, nonword repetition (NWR) was used to measure phonological working memory to determine the unique and collective contribution of ERP measures of phonemic discrimination and NWR as predictors of language ability. Method: Forty children between the ages of 24-48 months participated in an ERP experiment to determine phonemic discrimination to repeated and novel nonwords in an old/new design. Participants also completed a NWR task to explore the contribution of phonological working memory in predicting language. Results: ERP analyses revealed that faster responses to novel stimuli correlated with higher language performance on clinical assessments of language. Regression analyses revealed that an earlier component was associated with lower level phonemic sensitivity, and a later component was indexing phonological working memory skills similar to NWR. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that passive ERP responses indexing phonological discrimination and phonological working memory are strongly related to behavioral measures of language.