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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on May 17, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhk037
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

Group Intervention Changes Brain Activity in Bilingual Language-Impaired Children

Elina Pihko 1 *, Annika Mickos 2, Teija Kujala 3, Annika Pihlgren 4, Martin Westman 5, Paavo Alku 6, Roger Byring 7, and Marit Korkman 4

1 BioMag Laboratory, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland; Helsinki Brain Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland
2 The Research Center of Samfundet Folkhälsan, Helsinki, Finland; Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
3 Helsinki Brain Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland; Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
4 Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
5 Ekåsen-Tammiharju Hospital, Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, Tammisaari, Finland
6 Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
7 The Research Center of Samfundet Folkhälsan, Helsinki, Finland

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Elina Pihko, E-mail: pihko{at}biomag.hus.fi


  Abstract

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.

Keywords: auditory; MEG; mismatch response MMNm; P1m; specific language impairment SLI.
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