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Neural Oscillatory Dynamics Serving Lexical Decision-Making in Youth with Mild-to-Severe Hearing Loss

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jack Carroll^1,2, Zhiying Shen^1,2,3, Clare Reinhart^1,2, Grace Salloum^1,2, Nathan Petro^1,2, Elizabeth A. Walker⁴, Ryan W. McCreery^2,5, Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham^1,2,3; ¹Cognitive and Sensory Imaging Laboratory, Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA, ²Center for Pediatric Brain Health, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA, ³Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, NE, USA, ⁴Pediatric Audiology Lab, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA, ⁵Audibility, Perception, and Cognition Laboratory, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA

Despite early clinical interventions, children with mild-to-severe hearing loss (CHH) remain at greater risk for language deficits throughout development compared to children with normal hearing (CNH). Recent research has shown that a proper characterization of the neural dynamics underlying these language processes may hold promise in uncovering the biological underpinnings of these deficits. Nonetheless, an understanding of the neural dynamics that underlie language processes in youth and how auditory experience impacts these dynamics in CHH remains unclear. To this end, the current study aimed to characterize the neural responses that serve lexical decision-making processes among CHH and CNH. A sample of 50 CNH and 40 CHH ages 7-15 years completed a lexical decision-making task during magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants were binaurally presented with a stimulus and instructed to indicate whether they heard a word or pseudoword. MEG data was preprocessed and transformed into the time-frequency domain. Significant oscillatory responses were identified and imaged using beamforming, and the effects of group, age, and brain-behavior relationships were analyzed. While we found significant age-related improvements in task performance across groups, CHH responded significantly slower and were less accurate than CNH. Significant neural responses in the alpha and beta frequencies were identified in well-known language regions following the onset of the stimuli. Source-level linear-mixed effects modelling revealed frequency-specific effects of group and task condition on neural responses in the left language network, including the temporoparietal junction. These data suggest that altered auditory experience may impact the neural oscillatory dynamics that serve lexical processing

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Lexicon