School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts

Parent-child dyads in which the child is deaf but the parent is hearing present a unique opportunity to examine parents’ use of non-auditory cues, particularly vision and touch, to establish communicative intent. This study examines the multimodal communication patterns of hearing parents during a free play task with their hearing (N=9) or deaf (N=9) children. Specifically, we coded parents’ use of multimodal cues in the service of establishing joint attention with their children. Dyad types were compared for overall use of multimodal – auditory, visual, and tactile – attention-establishing cues, and for the overall number of successful and failed bids by a parent for a child’s attention. The relationship between multimodal behaviors on the part of the parent were tracked for whether they resulted in successful or failed initiation of joint attention. We focus our interpretation of the results on how hearing parents differentially accommodate their hearing and deaf children to engage them in joint attention. Findings can inform the development of recommendations for hearing parents of deaf children who are candidates for cochlear implantation regarding communication strategies to use prior to a child’s implantation. Moreover, these findings expand our understanding of how joint attention is established between parents and their preverbal children, regardless of children’s hearing status.

Self-regulation is a neuroregulatory process driven by function in both the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Although many investigations have explored the role of these systems in self-regulation independently, little work has examined how they cooperate across contexts, limiting the understanding of neurophysiological substrates of self-regulation. In a sample of 55 children (M_age = 5.85, SD = 0.80), the present study examined the coordination of cardiac and neural signals during rest and a mildly stressful task. Paired-samples t-tests confirmed that the stressor elicited increases in heart rate (HR) and decreases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), while correlations indicated stability in individual differences across phases. Wavelet transform coherence assessed coupling of dlPFC signals with HR and RSA. HR- and RSA-dlPFC coupling was observed in both contexts, but timescales of significant coupling varied across contexts, cardiac signals, and dlPFC hemispheres. No associations were found between the coupling of any signal at any timescale and child positive or negative affect or emotion regulation dysfunction. Findings suggest that cardiac-neural coupling is sensitive to timescale, context, and choice of cardiac signal. Future studies should consider other measures of behavioral regulation to better understand its potential relation with ANS-dlPFC coupling.

Objectives: To determine the association between parent-reported problem behaviors and objectively measured response inhibition in children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). Understanding this concordance could facilitate better clinical decision-making, as parent reports often guide treatment decisions despite unclear relationships with objective behavioral measures. Methods: This prospective observational study was conducted at a tertiary care pediatric otolaryngology clinic from 1/1/24-12/1/2024. Children aged 5-11 years with SDB symptoms were included, while those with clinically significant psychiatric or neurologic disorders were excluded. Parent-reported problem behaviors were measured using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), with the inhibit T-score as the primary predictor. The primary outcome was performance on the Flanker Test of Inhibitory Control and Attention, which measures response suppression to irrelevant stimuli while maintaining attention to target stimuli. Relationships between BRIEF scores and Flanker Test performance were assessed using Pearson correlation and linear regression, adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Results: Among 84 participants (mean age: 93 months [95% CI, 89-98], 56% male), parent-reported inhibitory problems showed a small but statistically significant correlation with response inhibition performance (r = -0.23, p = 0.04) in unadjusted analyses. This relationship was attenuated after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic factors. Other behavioral domains showed weaker associations. Adjusted R ² values ranged 0.14-0.16, indicating parent reports explained minimal variance in objective scores. Conclusion: Parent-reported behavioral problems showed limited concordance with objective measures of response inhibition in children with SDB. Treatment decisions for pediatric SDB should not rely solely on parent-reported behavioral symptoms, highlighting the need for integrating objective assessments when feasible. Level of Evidence: 3.

OBJECTIVE: Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) affects 10% of children and is associated with poor academic performance related to inattention and executive dysfunction. Yet, the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood, especially in elementary school-aged children who cannot sit still for functional magnetic resonance imaging. This study examines the feasibility of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a child-friendly neuroimaging tool, to assess prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation in children with SDB. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective observational study between January and November 2024. SETTING: Tertiary care academic children's hospital. METHODS: We assessed 78 children aged 5 to 11 referred for management of clinically significant SDB. Participants completed a Go/No-Go task measuring response inhibition while undergoing fNIRS recording of PFC activity. Parent-reported SDB symptom burden was assessed using the Pediatric Sleep Questionnaire Sleep-Related Breathing Disorders scale. Executive function was assessed using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) scores. RESULTS: Greater SDB symptom burden was associated with reduced PFC activation during the Go/No-Go task (r = -0.31, P = .028 in left middle frontal gyrus). Higher executive dysfunction correlated with lower PFC activation across multiple regions. The activation of the left dorsolateral PFC moderated the relationship between SDB symptoms and BRIEF Global Executive Composite (coefficient = -8.51, P = .039), suggesting neural compensation. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates the feasibility of using task-based fNIRS to assess neural correlates of SDB in children. SDB symptoms are negatively associated with PFC activation, which may moderate the impact of SDB on behavior. These findings suggest fNIRS could be a practical tool for studying brain function in pediatric SDB.

Auditory exposure plays a crucial role in shaping brain development, but little is known about whether and how an initial lack of auditory exposure might disrupt the development of functional network lateralization. We addressed this issue by acquiring functional near-infrared spectroscopy data from infants aged 3 to 9 months with congenital sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). The SNHL infants showed efficient small-world characteristics within each hemisphere. However, unlike typically developing controls, who showed an age-related leftward lateralization of network efficiencies, SNHL infants did not exhibit the emergence of hemispheric asymmetry. Intriguingly, lateralization of frontal efficiency was preserved in SNHL infants with mild hearing loss but declined significantly with increasing severity of hearing impairment. These findings suggest that even SNHL infants with some residual hearing experience disruption in the development of functional lateralization. This underscores the importance of providing early auditory access to SNHL infants to support robust functional integration during early development.

Individuals with “agrammatic” receptive aphasia have long been known to rely on semantic plausibility rather than syntactic cues when interpreting sentences. In contrast to early interpretations of this pattern as indicative of a deficit in syntactic knowledge, a recent proposal views agrammatic comprehension as a case of “noisy-channel” language processing with an increased expectation of noise in the input relative to healthy adults. Here, we investigate the nature of the noise model in aphasia and whether it is adapted to the statistics of the environment. We first replicate findings that a) healthy adults (N = 40) make inferences about the intended meaning of a sentence by weighing the prior probability of an intended sentence against the likelihood of a noise corruption and b) their estimate of the probability of noise increases when there are more errors in the input (manipulated via exposure sentences). We then extend prior findings that adults with chronic post-stroke aphasia (N = 28) and healthy age-matched adults (N = 19) similarly engage in noisy-channel inference during comprehension. We use a hierarchical latent mixture modeling approach to account for the fact that rates of guessing are likely to differ between healthy controls and individuals with aphasia and capture individual differences in the tendency to make inferences. We show that individuals with aphasia are more likely than healthy controls to draw noisy-channel inferences when interpreting semantically implausible sentences, even when group differences in the tendency to guess are accounted for. While healthy adults rapidly adapt their inference rates to an increase in noise in their input, whether individuals with aphasia do the same remains equivocal. Further investigation of comprehension through a noisy-channel lens holds promise for a parsimonious understanding of language processing in aphasia and may suggest potential avenues for treatment.

Web-based data collection allows researchers to recruit large and diverse samples with fewer resources than lab-based studies require. Recent innovations have expanded the set of methodolgies that are possible online, but ongoing work is needed to test the suitability of web-based tools for various research paradigms. Here, we focus on webcam-based eye-tracking; we tested whether the results of five different eye-tracking experiments in the cognitive psychology literature would replicate in a webcam-based format. Specifically, we carried out five experiments by integrating two javascript-based tools: jsPsych and a modified version of Webgazer.js. In order to represent a wide range of applications of eye-tracking to cognitive psychology, we chose two psycholinguistic experiments, two memory experiments, and a decision-making experiment. These studies also varied in the type of eye-tracking display, including screens split into halves (Exps. 3 and 5) or quadrants (Exps. 2 and 4), or composed scenes with regions of interest that varied in size (Exp. 1). Outcomes were mixed. The least successful replication attempt was Exp. 1; we did not obtain a condition effect in our remote sample (1a), nor in an in-lab follow-up (1b). However, the other four experiments were more successful, replicating a blank-screen effect (Exp. 2), a novelty preference (Exp. 3), a verb bias effect (Exp. 4), and a gaze-bias effect in decision-making (Exp. 5). These results suggest that webcam-based eye-tracking can be used to detect a variety of cognitive phenomena, including those with sensitive time, although paradigms that require high spatial resolution (like Exp. 1) should be adapted to coarser quadrant or split-half displays.

According to the cross-situational learning account, infants aggregate statistical information from multiple parent naming events to resolve ambiguous word-referent mappings within individual naming events. While previous experimental studies have shown that infant and adult learners can build correct mappings based on statistical regularities encoded in multiple learning situations in an experiment, other studies that use more naturalistic stimuli (e.g., real-world video) reveal poor performance in adults' ability to infer the correct referent. Based on those results derived from more naturalistic stimuli, the cross-situational learning solution cannot be useful to solve the mapping problem in the real world because cross-situational statistics from the real world are much more ambiguous than those created in experimental studies. To examine the feasibility of cross-situational learning in everyday contexts, the present study aims to quantify visual-audio statistics from one of everyday activities-parent-child toy play. We analyze parent naming events in a video corpus of infant-perspective scenes during parent-child toy play in a naturalistic lab setting, where we found three distinct properties that characterize statistical regularities perceived by young learners: (1) there are a limited number of visual scene compositions perceived by young learners at the moments when they hear object names; (2) the frequencies of parent naming events are distributed in a skewed, Zipfian fashion; and (3) cross-situational statistics in naturalistic toy play are comparable to those used in laboratory experiments. Our results underscore the importance of quantifying the statistical regularities in the input from the learner's perspective in order to shed light on the mechanisms supporting early word learning.

Music traditions worldwide are subject to remarkable diversity but the origins of this variation are not well understood. Musical behaviour is the product of a multicomponent collection of abilities, some possibly evolved for music but most derived from traits serving nonmusical functions. Cultural evolution has stitched together these systems, generating variable normative practices across cultures and musical genres. Here, we describe the cultural evolution of musical distortion, a noisy manipulation of instrumental and vocal timbre that emulates nonlinear phenomena (NLP) present in the vocal signals of many animals. We suggest that listeners' sensitivity to NLP has facilitated technological developments for altering musical instruments and singing with distortion, which continues to evolve culturally via the need for groups to both coordinate internally and differentiate themselves from other groups. To support this idea, we present an agent-based model of norm evolution illustrating possible dynamics of continuous traits such as timbral distortion in music, dependent on (i) a functional optimum, (ii) intra-group cohesion and inter-group differentiation and (iii) groupishness for assortment and social learning. This account illustrates how cultural transmission dynamics can lead to diversity in musical sounds and genres, and also provides a more general explanation for the emergence of subgroup-differentiating norms.This article is part of the theme issue 'Nonlinear phenomena in vertebrate vocalizations: mechanisms and communicative functions'.