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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

The developmental trajectory and neuroanatomical correlates of speech comprehension

Jill Kries¹, Brian Ervin, Jason Buroker, Gregory Hickok, Ravindra Arya, Laura Gwilliams¹; ¹Stanford University

Presenter: Jill Kries

Language acquisition spans early childhood into young adulthood. Neural mechanisms underlying this prolonged development, especially within naturalistic speech comprehension settings, remain understudied. Here, we used intracranial EEG recordings from 42 children with epilepsy while they listened to natural speech. We reconstructed acoustic and symbolic features from the neural data and found significant above-chance decoding in 77% of children. An ascending pattern of across-age feature decoding indicates later development of more symbolic features. The features seem to be co-encoded in temporal regions. These findings provide first insights into the language hierarchy development and the neuroanatomical correlates of speech comprehension throughout childhood.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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