Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
The relation of language and attention skills to brain functional activity in children with ASD and ADHD.
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Anna Banaszkiewicz1, Karolina Zielińska1, Hanna Górecka1, Anna Redeł1, Anna Szukało1, Katarzyna Jednoróg1; 1Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Up to 15% children are identified as having one or more neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs; Gidziela et al., 2023), such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ASD and ADHD display overlapping symptomatology, especially in areas of social communication, cognitive functions and attention. These shared traits often blur diagnostic boundaries and complicate efforts to understand underlying mechanisms. Moreover, language development in NDDs and its associations with attention is still poorly understood. To address this gap, the current project aims at investigating the relationship between language skills, brain activity and attention in 5-to-7 year-old children with ASD, ADHD, and typically developing (TD; all native Polish speakers, IQ within age norms). Data collection is ongoing and will be completed by June 2025. Currently the sample includes 45 children with ASD (18 girls), 41 children with ADHD (18 girls), and 36 typically developing children (20 girls). Children completed a battery of behavioral tests including standardized Language Development Test (Smoczynska et al., 2015), a child-friendly version of a go/no-go task and the Attention Network Task (ANT; Rueda et al., 2004). During the functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) session children performed an auditory localizer task of their native language, based on Malik-Moraleda et al. (2022). They listened to short passages from Alice in Wonderland (intact condition) along with an acoustically distorted control condition. Each of 2 runs consisted of 6 intact passages 6 degraded passages (18 s each), presented in pseudo randomised order. Preprocessing of fMRI data will be performed using the fMRIPrep pipeline (Esteban et al., 2019). First-level models and group-level analyses will be run using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM12). At the 1st level, a localizer contrast intact condition > distorted condition will be computed. At the 2nd level, a series of one-sample t-tests will be computed to investigate whole-brain activations for the localizer task for each group, along with a one-way ANOVA analysis testing between-group differences. Beta values will be extracted from independent regions of interest of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) from Fedorenko et al. (2010), for the localizer contrast (intact > distorted). Obtained beta values will be correlated with language test scores (word- and sentence comprehension subtests), go/no-go and ANT scores. Previous fMRI research using the Alice in Wonderland localizer paradigm with children (Tang, 2024; Hiersche, 2024) revealed functional activity in the left IFG and the left STG during language processing. To our knowledge there is no research using this localizer in groups of young children with NDDs. We predict that the language localizer will activate language-related regions including the left IFG and STG in all groups. However, we expect that the extent of the language-related activity would differ between groups and will be positively correlated to language and attention abilities. This study has the potential to expand our knowledge of typical and atypical development, highlighting complex associations between language and attention which could pave the way for early interventions guidelines in the future.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Language Development/Acquisition