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    • Findings from the present study

    2018-11-07

    Findings from the present study lend support to evidence from behavioral, cellular, and ERP research that when syntactic unification skills are not yet at the level necessary to effectively perform a grammaticality judgment task (as demonstrated by the lack of a P600 effect and beta power decreases) children may engage other cognitive processes. Although the N400 has been related to semantic integration, the lack of correlation to changes in theta suggests children may be using another compensatory strategy to identify grammatical errors. In fact, theta power changes have been related to lexical retrieval (Bastiaansen et al., 2005, 2008) and working memory (Bastiaansen et al., 2002). Future research is needed to determine which compensatory strategy(s) children engage as an important precursor for the successful development of syntactic processing. Although children may have had a lower signal-to-noise ratio due to having fewer trials than adults, it seems unlikely to have influenced our overall findings based on the bms-690514 of our results when the number of trials were evenly matched and the presence of a significant N400 in children. Rather, the N400 effect and lack of beta power decreases at such a late age in this study is likely due to the difficulty associated with identifying a subtle morphosyntatic error when presented in naturally paced auditory sentences. The present study adds to past literature by investigating the role of neural oscillations in language development during real-time sentence processing. Although the ERP findings in this study identified differences in the processing of syntactic errors, time frequency analysis allowed us to further decompose the multidimensional EEG data, which contains frequency as one of its dimensions, allotting us greater opportunities to link raw EEG data to neurophysiological processes (Cohen, 2014). This is contrary to ERP data which only represent a fraction of the entire EEG; therefore, there are many task-related dynamics related to sentence processing within EEG that are only retrievable by uncovering the underlying neural oscillations. As a result, there has been a large increase in interest in neural oscillations during language processing in adults, though little work has focused on how these processes develop. We feel the addition of the neural oscillation data uncovered important findings related to language development. Specifically, the present study found no correlation between the N400 and theta, indicating that theta may be identifying the engagement of an additional cognitive process, which is unidentified within the ERP. This finding could potentially add a new dimension to our previous understanding of sentence processing, by implying working memory, or another cognitive process, is necessary. Further research within the field is necessary to better clarify this link; however, this is the first study to investigate the neural oscillations engaged during auditory language processing in children. These preliminary findings support previous claims that the cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic processing are still developing in adolescence, and add to them by more clearly identifying developmental changes in the neural oscillations underlying grammatical processing.
    Introduction Early onset Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with a lifetime prevalence rate of 11% (Avenevoli et al., 2015). However the neural basis of this disorder remains poorly understood particularly during adolescence. In adults disruptions have been noted in cognitive affective biases that are linked to dysfunctional brain activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC), subcortical, and medial temporal regions, including striatum, hippocampus (HC) and amygdala (AMG) (Clark et al., 2009; Roiser and Sahakian, 2013). Cognitive biases occur across a range of processes in MDD and include a greater likelihood of remembering negative over positive material (Leppänen, 2006; Foland-Ross and Gotlib, 2012) as well as greater attentional engagement with dysphoric facial emotion expressions (Gur et al., 1992; Surguladze et al., 2004; Leppänen, 2006; Foland-Ross and Gotlib, 2012).