Neural correlates of understanding emotional words in late childhood.

Prior studies involving adults have shown that words can elicit emotional processing, with emotion-label (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., gift) having distinct processes. However, limited studies have explored the developmental changes in these processes in relation to emotional valence. To address this question, this exploratory study measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 11-14-year-old children/adolescents (N = 25) and adults (N = 23) while performing an emotional categorization task. The stimuli used were two-character Chinese words, with factors for word type (emotion-label versus emotion-laden) and valence (positive versus negative). To confirm word emotionality, neutral words were also included and compared with all emotional words. The results showed that adults exhibited reduced N400 amplitudes to emotion-label words compared to emotion-laden ones in both positive and negative valence contexts. The differentiation was only sustained for negative valence in the late positive component (LPC). Similar scalp distributions of the effects of word type were found in children/adolescents; however, they exhibited a more prolonged processing of all emotional words than adults. These results suggest that the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words are distinct in late childhood, and this discrepancy varies with emotional valence and increasing age.

Deficits in Processing of Lexical Tones in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Electrophysiological Evidence.

Purpose This study explored the neural marker indexing deficits in discriminating lexical tone changes in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) using mismatch negativity, an event-related potential component for auditory change detection. Mandarin has four lexical tones characterized by a high-level tone (T1), high-rising tone (T2), low-dipping tone (T3), and high-falling tone (T4), in which the T2/T3 contrast is acoustically less discriminable in developmental groups. Therefore, this study further examined how deficits in children with DLD would vary with tonal contrasts' acoustic saliency. Method Event-related potentials were measured using the multideviant oddball paradigm described by Lee et al. (2012), who used Mandarin syllables [i] in T3 as the standard sound (80%), T1 as the large deviant (10%), and T2 as the small deviant (10%). Twelve children with DLD aged between 4 and 6 years participated in this study, and 12 age-matched children with typical development were selected from the data set of Lee et al. (2012) as the controls. Results The T1/T3 change elicited adultlike mismatch negativity in both the DLD and control groups, while no group difference was revealed. The T2/T3 change elicited a robust positive mismatch response (P-MMR) in children with DLD, while the P-MMR was less significant in the control group. The group comparisons revealed a larger P-MMR in children with DLD than in the control group. Furthermore, children with lower scores in language assessments tend to reveal larger P-MMRs. Conclusions This study demonstrated that deficits in children with DLD in discriminating subtle lexical tone changes reflect greater positivity of P-MMR to T2/T3 change. This implies that MMR to T2/T3 may serve as a neural marker for evaluating language delay in preschoolers.

Coherent emotional perception from body expressions and the voice.

Perceiving emotion from multiple modalities enhances the perceptual sensitivity of an individual. This allows more accurate judgments of others' emotional states, which is crucial to appropriate social interactions. It is known that body expressions effectively convey emotional messages, although fewer studies have examined how this information is combined with the auditory cues. The present study used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate the interaction between emotional body expressions and vocalizations. We also examined emotional congruency between auditory and visual information to determine how preceding visual context influences later auditory processing. Consistent with prior findings, a reduced N1 amplitude was observed in the audiovisual condition compared to an auditory-only condition. While this component was not sensitive to the modality congruency, the P2 was sensitive to the emotionally incompatible audiovisual pairs. Further, the direction of these congruency effects was different in terms of facilitation or suppression based on the preceding contexts. Overall, the results indicate a functionally dissociated mechanism underlying two stages of emotional processing whereby N1 is involved in cross-modal processing, whereas P2 is related to assessing a unifying perceptual content. These data also indicate that emotion integration can be affected by the specific emotion that is presented.

The influences of solid-phase organic constituents on the partition of aliphatic and aromatic organic contaminants.

The influence of natural organic matter (NOM) constituents on contaminant distribution coefficients was evaluated by determining the Koc values of aromatic and aliphatic organic compounds (solutes) with clays modified with both aromatic- and aliphatic-rich organic constituents. The studied compounds consisted of naphthalene, phenanthrene, n-pentane, and 2,3,4-trimethylmethane; the solid samples comprised two clays with little organic content, kaolinite and Ca-montmorillonite. Two aliphatic surfactants and three aromatic dyes, sorbed to the clays, served as reference NOM constituents. For solutes of comparable water solubilities, the organic-carbon normalized distribution coefficients (Koc) of the aliphatic solutes between sorbed aliphatic organic matter and aqueous solution slightly exceed those of the aromatic solutes. By contrast, the aromatic solutes exhibited higher Koc values than did the aliphatic compounds with sorbed aromatic-rich organic matter. The difference in Koc values could be attributed to either comparable solubility parameters or the difference in the chemical structure between nonionic organic solutes and specific components of the simulated NOM. The much higher Koc values observed for the aromatic solutes indicate that the NOM composition is a major factor determining the NOC environmental distribution.

Attention deficits revealed by passive auditory change detection for pure tones and lexical tones in ADHD children.

Inattention (IA) has been a major problem in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), accounting for their behavioral and cognitive dysfunctions. However, there are at least three processing steps underlying attentional control for auditory change detection, namely pre-attentive change detection, involuntary attention orienting, and attention reorienting for further evaluation. This study aimed to examine whether children with ADHD would show deficits in any of these subcomponents by using mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and late discriminative negativity (LDN) as event-related potential (ERP) markers, under the passive auditory oddball paradigm. Two types of stimuli-pure tones and Mandarin lexical tones-were used to examine if the deficits were general across linguistic and non-linguistic domains. Participants included 15 native Mandarin-speaking children with ADHD and 16 age-matched controls (across groups, age ranged between 6 and 15 years). Two passive auditory oddball paradigms (lexical tones and pure tones) were applied. The pure tone oddball paradigm included a standard stimulus (1000 Hz, 80%) and two deviant stimuli (1015 and 1090 Hz, 10% each). The Mandarin lexical tone oddball paradigm's standard stimulus was /yi3/ (80%) and two deviant stimuli were /yi1/ and /yi2/ (10% each). The results showed no MMN difference, but did show attenuated P3a and enhanced LDN to the large deviants for both pure and lexical tone changes in the ADHD group. Correlation analysis showed that children with higher ADHD tendency, as indexed by parents' and teachers' ratings on ADHD symptoms, showed less positive P3a amplitudes when responding to large lexical tone deviants. Thus, children with ADHD showed impaired auditory change detection for both pure tones and lexical tones in both involuntary attention switching, and attention reorienting for further evaluation. These ERP markers may therefore be used for the evaluation of anti-ADHD drugs that aim to alleviate these dysfunctions.

Mismatch responses to lexical tone, initial consonant, and vowel in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers.

The present study investigates how age, phonological saliency, and deviance size affect the presence of mismatch negativity (MMN) and positive mismatch response (P-MMR). This work measured the auditory mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, initial consonants, and vowels in 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers using the multiple-deviant oddball paradigm. The data showed the coexistence of MMN and P-MMR in the same age group when responding to the three types of syllabic features in Mandarin. The transition from a predominantly positive response to a predominantly negative response supported the multiple MMN mechanisms. Congruent with the phonological saliency hypothesis and the phonetic acquisition order of Mandarin in behavioral studies, for the compulsory elements of Mandarin syllables, lexical tones, and vowels, the larger deviants elicited adult-like MMNs, whereas the smaller deviants elicited P-MMRs. The optional elements of the Mandarin syllables, the initial consonant, only elicited P-MMR in preschoolers. These findings suggest that MMN and P-MMR index different functional characteristics and may provide information on when and how children's speech perception becomes automatic at different developmental stages.