School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

It has been proposed that language impairments in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) stem from atypical neural processing of speech and/or nonspeech sounds. However, the strength of this proposal is compromised by the unreliable outcomes of previous studies of speech and nonspeech processing in ASD. The aim of this study was to…

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.…

We report asymmetrical cortical responses (steady-state visual evoked potentials) to radial expansion and contraction in human infants and adults. Forty-four infants (22 3-month-olds and 22 4-month-olds) and nine adults viewed dynamic dot patterns which cyclically (2.1 Hz) alternate between radial expansion (or contraction) and random directional…

This study compared sentence comprehension skills in typically developing children 5-17 years of age, children with language impairment (LI) and children with focal brain injuries (FL) acquired in the pre/perinatal period. Participants were asked to process sentences "on-line", choosing the agent in sentences that varied in syntactic complexity…