Poster D9, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Deficits in Language Development of Children Raised in Institutional Care: Behavioral and ERP indices
Marina Zhukova1,2, Sergey Kornilov1, Olga Titova2, Irina Ovchinnikova1,2, Irina Golovanova2, Aleksandra Davydova2, Tatiana Logvinenko2, Elena Grigorenko1,2,3,4;1University of Houston, 2Saint-Petersburg State University, 3Yale University, 4Baylor College of Medicine
Children raised in institutional care (IC) demonstrate а cascade of deficits in language development in receptive and expressive domains (Glatzhofer, 2010; Loman et al., 2009). Children raised in IC demonstrate a lack of comprehensive utterances at the age of 30 months when exposed to severe deprivation (i.e., Romanian orphanages) (Windsor et al., 2007), poor sentence comprehension (Desmarais et al., 2012), lower overall language functioning and cognitive control. It is argued that those deficits might be a result of functional alterations in neural structures due to chronic stress that children in orphanages are exposed to (Eigsti et al., 2011). Most studies have focused on samples of internationally adopted children and used behavioral methods of language testing, providing limited information about the developmental trajectories of children who remain in institutions. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate both the behavioral and neuropsychological aspects of language development in children who currently live in IC. We have collected data from 28 children residing in institutional care in Russian Federation (IC; 15 males; Mage=32.50 months, SD=7.50) and 16 age-matched peers raised in biological families (BF; 5 males Mage=35.13 months, SD=8.08). Behavioral measures of language assessment included Preschool Language Scales-5 (Zimmerman, 2011; Zhukova et al., 2016) and McArthur CDI (Fenson et al., 2006). Neurobiological indices of language development were assessed using a cross-modal picture word paradigm, aimed at eliciting the N400 ERP component. Children were presented with a picture and an auditory word that matched the picture or mismatched it in three possible ways (unrelated real word, phonotactically legal Russian pseudoword, or illegal pseudoword), for a total of 160 trials. EEG was recorded using a high-density 64-electrode actiCHamp EEG acquisition setup and processed offline in Brain Vision Analyzer. Average amplitude has been extracted for the 350-550ms time window. Findings suggest that children in the IC group significantly underperformed on expressive (β= -.86, SE= .18, p< .001) and receptive (β = -.59, SE =.19, p < .05) behavioral language measures compared to the BF group. Group effects were significant controlling for non-verbal intelligence, age and gender. On the neurobiological level, children in the IC group demonstrated a significantly reduced N400 component in response to the unrelated real word condition in the midline electrode clusters compared to the BF group (β= 2.11, SE= 1.07, p< 0.05). Instead of the expected N400 component, they demonstrated a positive waveform peaking around 300 ms, resembling the non-linguistic P3a component. We have also found significant associations between the N400 amplitude in the left-central electrode cluster and expressive language scores (r= -.423, p<.05) and communication (r= -.519, p< .05). The findings suggest that expressive language skills are associated with the magnitude of neural response to semantic mismatch. Reduced neural response to incongruity suggests that children in the IC group use different functional networks to process linguistic information. Our findings expand the literature regarding detrimental effects of institutional care on language development. Research was supported by the Government of the Russian Federation (grant № 14.Z50.31.0027; E.L.G., Principal Investigator).
Themes: Development, Disorders: Developmental
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)