Early Language Processing and Brain Development: A Comparative Study Between the UK and India

• In Event: 2-043 - Objective measures of early development in low- and middle-income countries: EEG, Eye-tracking, fNIRS

Integrative Statement

Children exposed to early adversities are at a high risk of cognitive delays. Language development is a key predictor of later cognitive abilities, but diagnosis of atypical language trajectories is usually not reliable until after infancy. Furthermore, these measures do not assess the underlying cognitive processes that support language development. Thus, it is crucial to develop reliable, sensitive and culturally appropriate early measures.

The objective of this study is the development and cross-cultural validation of the Early Language Processing (ELP) tool across two populations (India and UK) with different backgrounds (low and high SES), languages (English and Awadhi) and cultures. The ELP uses a portable eyetracker and is based on three well-researched tasks that measure basic language processing: The Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT; Friend & Keplinger, 2003), word processing speed (Fernald, et al., 1998), and referent selection and retention (Bion, Borovsky & Fernald, 2013; Samuelson, Kucker & Spencer, 2017).

The ELP task consists of two blocks of 34 and 29 trials separated by a 5-minute retention interval. On each trial, a pair of pictures is displayed on the screen for 2000 ms. Then a gaze contingent character appears in the middle and names the target. The pictures remain for a 3200 ms response period (Figure 1). There are three types of trials: Familiar trials, include nouns, verbs and adjectives varying in difficulty. Novel Mapping Trials include one well-known and one novel object. Children are prompted with a novel word as a test of novelty detection and fast-mapping. Retention Trials, include two previously-mapped novel objects. Children are prompted with one of the previously-mapped novel words. The ELP was first developed in British English and then adapted to Awadhi and the cultural norms of Uttar Pradesh, our region of interest in India before validation.

The ELP provides both “outcome” measures such as accuracy for known words and retention of new word-object mappings, and measures of basic processes such as novelty detection, and speed of processing. Furthermore, the ELP has been developed alongside two ongoing longitudinal projects examining development of functional brain networks for cognitive processing in children from the same target populations. This provides a unique opportunity for cross-cultural validation, and also to relate the language measures to multiple cognitive, environmental, contextual and neural measures.

Full data collection is ongoing but preliminary indications are that the task is engaging for children from both cultures. As can be seen in Figure 2, across groups, children look longest at the target, indicating a general understanding of the task, with large amounts of variability between children. Once a complete dataset is collected, we will look to relate this variability to different word types and difficulties, as well as to SES and brain development differences. We will discuss how our measures of early word learning processes are related to each other both within and across the two populations as well as their relation to measures of brain development and other cognitive processes with an eye towards assessment and early intervention.

Authors

• Laia Fibla Reixachs, University of East Anglia
  Presenting Author

• John Spencer, University of East Anglia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Larissa K Samuelson, University of East Anglia
  Non-Presenting Author