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Impaired slow temporal sampling and cortical network coordination during natural speech listening in children with developmental language disorder

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Mahmoud Keshavarzi¹ (mk919@cam.ac.uk), Georgia Feltham¹, Lyla Parvez¹, Susan Richards¹, Usha Goswami¹; ¹University of Cambridge

Neural tracking of slow temporal modulations (< 10 Hz) in speech supports the extraction of prosodic and syllabic structure critical for comprehension, and also for language acquisition by infants. Temporal Sampling (TS) theory proposes that developmental language disorders arise from atypical cortical encoding of these slow prosodic and syllabic rhythms. However, direct source-level neurophysiological evidence from children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) remains scarce. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) while 9-year-old children with DLD and typically developing controls listened to a narrated story. Computational modelling of this story quantified the temporal rates relating to prosody and syllable structure. Using individualised source reconstruction, we quantified lagged speech–brain coherence and frequency-specific functional connectivity across bilateral auditory and speech-language cortical regions. Children with DLD showed significantly reduced speech-brain coherence in the 0.9–2.5 Hz range (prosodic structure), spanning bilateral auditory cortex and inferior frontal regions. At syllabic rates (2.5–5 Hz), coherence reductions were more spatially restricted and predominantly right-lateralised within superior temporal cortex. No reliable group differences were observed at higher modulation frequencies (5–9 Hz or 12–40 Hz). However, functional connectivity analyses revealed frequency-dependent alterations in inter-regional phase synchronisation across all bands, indicating disrupted large-scale cortical coordination during speech processing in DLD. These findings provide direct source-level MEG support for TS theory, identifying reduced slow-rate neural alignment as a key mechanism in developmental language disorder. The selective impairments in slow temporal speech sampling in DLD alongside altered cortical network dynamics during naturalistic speech perception would have profound developmental effects.

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