Association between neural prosody discrimination and language abilities in toddlers: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

TL;DR

This study shows that toddlers' brain activity related to prosody discrimination is linked to their language abilities, suggesting it could help identify language delays early.

Contribution

The study introduces fNIRS-based neural prosody discrimination as a potential objective tool for early detection of language delay in toddlers.

Findings

Full-term toddlers showed prosody discrimination in most channels, while preterm toddlers only in channel 6.

Prosody discrimination in the right angular gyrus significantly predicted language delay in full-term toddlers.

An fNIRS-based model predicted language delay in preterm toddlers with an ROC area of 0.687.

Abstract

Language delay affects near- and long-term social communication and learning in toddlers, and, an increasing number of experts pay attention to it. The development of prosody discrimination is one of the earliest stages of language development in which key skills for later stages are mastered. Therefore, analyzing the relationship between brain discrimination of speech prosody and language abilities may provide an objective basis for the diagnosis and intervention of language delay.

In this study, all cases(n = 241) were enrolled from a tertiary women’s hospital, from 2021 to 2022. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess children’s neural prosody discrimination abilities, and a Chinese communicative development inventory (CCDI) were used to evaluate their language abilities.

Ninety-eight full-term and 108 preterm toddlers were included in the final analysis in phase I and II studies, respectively. The total CCDI screening abnormality rate was 9.2% for full-term and 34.3% for preterm toddlers. Full-term toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in all channels except channel 5, while preterm toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in channel 6 only. Multifactorial logistic regression analyses showed that prosody discrimination of the right angular gyrus (channel 3) had a statistically significant effect on language delay (odd ratio = 0.301, P < 0.05) in full-term toddlers. Random forest (RF) regression model presented that prosody discrimination reflected by channels and brain regions based on fNIRS data was an important parameter for predicting language delay in preterm toddlers, among which the prosody discrimination reflected by the right angular gyrus (channel 4) was the most important parameter. The area under the model Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.687.

Neural prosody discrimination ability is positively associated with language development, assessment of brain prosody discrimination abilities through fNIRS could be used as an objective indicator for early identification of children with language delay in the future clinical application.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12887-024-04889-7.

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