The overall goal of this project is to test the hypothesis that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is associated with deficits in acoustic processing. To this end, the mismatch negativity (MMN) of event-related potentials will be used to assess a variety of basic capacities associated with pre-attentive, automatic processing of acoustic events. These capacities include: 1. detection of changes in intensity, frequency and stimulus duration; 2. identifying features of acoustic stimuli that are constant while other features change; 3. determining that the order of two-tones pairs has changed; 4. determining that the serial order of three to five tones has changed; 5. forming an abstract rule as to the direction of change between the frequencies of two-tones pairs across a series of pairs (e.g., that they all rise in frequency from the first to the second tone), while the absolute frequencies of the tone pairs varies; 6. the duration of transient memory upon which the MMN relies. In addition, SLI and control subjects will receive training on the paradigm used in points 1-4 above which yields the poorest MMN to determine whether the MN will become larger in amplitude and/or shorter in latency.
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