Early Brain Trajectories & Evolving Oscillations: Template for Mature Function?

Ongoing research in my laboratory provides evidence that the ability to perform fine-grained acoustic analysis in the tens-of-millisecond range during infancy appears to be one of the most powerful and significant predictors of subsequent language development and disorders. Our prospective, longitudinal research using converging paradigms including dense-array EEG (dEEG) has shown that non-linguistic, spectro-temporally modulated, rapid auditory processing skills in the first year of life can serve as a "marker" of later language, and thus are of particular utility for early identification and proactive remediation. Although there is no consensus as to the extent to which developmental and neuropsychiatric disorders may reflect early disruption in dynamic coordination and/or a failure to establish well-formed structural and functional networks, accumulating evidence suggests that the emergence, function and maturation of oscillatory mechanisms are crucial to normative development. Identification of biomarkers that may characterize atypical development is therefore critical to elucidating the neurobiology underlying various developmental disorders. In this talk, I will present data from several studies that illustrate how dEEG measures of oscillatory synchrony and cross-frequency phase coupling differ in typically developing children and those at higher risk for developmental disorders or with clinically diagnosed developmental disorders.