Auditory Mismatch Response to Pitch and Duration Changes in Children with Developmental Language Disorder: A Longitudinal Approach

Developmental language disorder is characterized by difficulties in auditory processing and prosody perception. Estonian word prosody features a unique three-way quantity distinction, characterized by changes in syllable duration and pitch contour, which differentiate word meaning and grammatical cases. We investigated auditory discrimination in 50 children (25 with developmental language disorder), aged 4-7 years, using the event-related potential Mismatch Response and behavioral tasks longitudinally at two assessment points. Here, we specifically focus on the results of the second assessment and compared these results with those reported previously (Themas et al., 2025a) In the duration change condition, we observed a shift from a positive at mean age of 5;8 years to a negative Mismatch Response at mean age of 6;8 years, which was less pronounced in the developmental language disorder group compared to their typically developing peers. Interestingly, we found a significant negative association between the change of the Mismatch Response amplitude and behavioral discrimination, suggesting a stronger change from positive to a more negative Mismatch Response to be associated with better behavioral discrimination performance for both groups. In the duration and pitch change condition, no Mismatch Response was observed in either group at the first or second assessment. This study sheds light on the maturation of auditory change detection processes and deepens our understanding of the interplay between neurophysiological and behavioral indicators in children with and without language impairments.