ИСТИНА

Most ERP studies of DLD to date have focused on auditory (tone) and speech processing. We investigated phonological and lexical-semantic processing in school-aged children with DLD (n=23) and their typically developing (TD, n=16) peers, drawn from a population in rural Russia with high incidence of DLD in the absence of apparent sensory, neurological, and genetic explanatory factors. We used a cross-modal auditory word-picture matching paradigm where children saw pictures and heard words in five conditions: a) Match (target condition; see and hear "cat"); b) Cohort (initial phonological overlap ; see "cat", hear "coat"); c) Rhyme (see "cat", hear "hat"); d) Semantic (semantically related, see "cat", hear "mouse"); and e) Unrelated (see "cat", hear "doll"). Conventional amplitude/latency analysis and temporospatial principal component analysis indicate that children with DLD showed atypical early occipital negativities (N2, 196 ms post-stimulus-onset) across all conditions (p = .002). Crucially, children with DLD showed reduced N400s for Cohorts (p = .001) and Unrelated words (p = .024). The N400 reduction for Cohorts but not Unrelated words was associated with lower scores on behavioral indices of phonological (r = -.46, p = .006) and lexical development (r = - .47, p = .004). These results suggest that children with DLD display deficits in the dynamics of lexical activation and lexical semantic processing potentially coupled with or mediated by deficits in phonological processing. In particular, the reduced Cohort and Unrelated N400 effects – both failures to show robust responses to mismatches in onset phonology – are consistent with weak phonological inhibition.