Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(4):849-858; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhk037
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Group Intervention Changes Brain Activity in Bilingual Language-Impaired Children
1 BioMag Laboratory, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland, 2 Helsinki Brain Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland, 3 The Research Center of Samfundet Folkhälsan, Helsinki, Finland, 4 Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, 5 Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, 6 Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, 7 Ekåsen-Tammiharju Hospital, Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, Tammisaari, Finland, 8 Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
Address correspondence to Elina Pihko, BioMag Laboratory, Helsinki University Central Hospital, PO Box 340, 00029 HUS, Finland. Email: pihko{at}biomag.hus.fi.
This investigation assessed the effectiveness of a phonological intervention program on the brain functioning of bilingual Finnish 6- to 7-year-old preschool children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). The intervention program was implemented by preschool teachers to small groups of children including children with SLI. A matched group of other bilingual children with SLI received a physical exercise program and served as a control group. Auditory evoked magnetic fields were measured before and after the intervention with an oddball paradigm. The brain activity recordings were followed by a behavioral discrimination test. Our results show that, in children with SLI, the positive intervention effect is reflected in plastic changes in the brain activity of the left and right auditory cortices.
Key Words: auditory MEG mismatch response MMNm P1m specific language impairment SLI