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Mismatch Negativity responses to early-acquired sounds in children with speech sound disorders

To examine whether children with speech sound disorders (SSD) have sparsely specified phonological representations, the present study recorded neural responses to early-acquired speech sounds in children with SSD and their typically developing controls (ages 4-6 years). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while children listened to speech syllables containing two early-acquired sounds: /b/ and /d/. While both the typically developing (TD) children and children with SSD demonstrated Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses, the responses of the TD children were significantly larger. The identification of the smaller MMN responses suggests that children with SSD may have less specified phonological representations, which may impact their ability to correctly produce speech sounds. In addition, when all of the children’s data were pooled together, the MMN responses were strongly correlated with measures of speech production. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the MMN reflects acoustic-phonetic processing, which appears to be less developed in children with SSD.