Compromised word-level neural tracking in the high-gamma band for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Cheng Luo; Yayue Gao; Jianing Fan; Yang Liu; Yonglin Yu; Xin Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2023.1174720

Compromised word-level neural tracking in the high-gamma band for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Front Hum Neurosci. 2023 May 5:17:1174720. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1174720. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Cheng Luo^#¹, Yayue Gao^#², Jianing Fan², Yang Liu², Yonglin Yu³, Xin Zhang⁴

Affiliations

¹ Research Center for Applied Mathematics and Machine Intelligence, Research Institute of Basic Theories, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou, China.
² Department of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing, China.
³ Department of Rehabilitation, The Children's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, National Clinical Research Center for Child Health, Hangzhou, China.
⁴ Department of Neurology, The Children's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, National Clinical Research Center for Child Health, Hangzhou, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) exhibit pervasive difficulties in speech perception. Given that speech processing involves both acoustic and linguistic stages, it remains unclear which stage of speech processing is impaired in children with ADHD. To investigate this issue, we measured neural tracking of speech at syllable and word levels using electroencephalography (EEG), and evaluated the relationship between neural responses and ADHD symptoms in 6-8 years old children. Twenty-three children participated in the current study, and their ADHD symptoms were assessed with SNAP-IV questionnaires. In the experiment, the children listened to hierarchical speech sequences in which syllables and words were, respectively, repeated at 2.5 and 1.25 Hz. Using frequency domain analyses, reliable neural tracking of syllables and words was observed in both the low-frequency band (<4 Hz) and the high-gamma band (70-160 Hz). However, the neural tracking of words in the high-gamma band showed an anti-correlation with the ADHD symptom scores of the children. These results indicate that ADHD prominently impairs cortical encoding of linguistic information (e.g., words) in speech perception.

Keywords: ADHD; acoustic encoding; linguistic processing; neural tracking; speech perception.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 32200860 and 32200862), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LGF19H090020), Institute of Psychology, CAS (No. GJ202005), Exploratory Research Project of Zhejiang Lab (No. 2022RC0AN01), and Beihang University Sponsored Projects for Core Young Researchers in the Disciplines of Social Sciences and Humanities.