Auditory processing of speech and non-speech stimuli oftentimes involves the analysis and acquisition of non-adjacent sound patterns. Previous studies using speech material have demonstrated (i) children’s early emerging ability to extract non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) and (ii) a relation between basic auditory perception and this ability. Yet, it is currently unclear whether children show similar sensitivities and similar perceptual influences for NADs in the non-linguistic domain. We conducted an event-related potential study with 3-year-old children using a sine-tone-based oddball task, which simultaneously tested for NAD learning and auditory perception by means of varying sound intensity. Standard stimuli were A × B sine-tone sequences, in which specific A elements predicted specific B elements after variable × elements. NAD deviants violated the dependency between A and B and intensity deviants were reduced in amplitude. Both elicited similar frontally distributed positivities, suggesting successful deviant detection. Crucially, there was a predictive relationship between the amplitude of the sound intensity discrimination effect and the amplitude of the NAD learning effect. These results are taken as evidence that NAD learning in the non-linguistic domain is functional in 3-year-olds and that basic auditory processes are related to the learning of higher-order auditory regularities also outside the linguistic domain.

中文翻译：

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听觉感知的个体差异预测 3 岁儿童学习非相邻音调序列

语音和非语音刺激的听觉处理通常涉及非相邻声音模式的分析和获取。先前使用语音材料的研究已经证明（i）儿童早期出现的提取非相邻依赖性（NAD）的能力以及（ii）基本听觉感知与这种能力之间的关系。然而，目前尚不清楚儿童是否在非语言领域对 NAD 表现出类似的敏感性和类似的感知影响。我们使用基于正弦音的奇怪任务对 3 岁儿童进行了一项事件相关电位研究，通过不同的声音强度同时测试 NAD 学习和听觉感知。标准刺激是 A × B 正弦音序列，其中特定的 A 元素在可变 × 元素之后预测特定的 B 元素。 NAD 偏差违反了 A 和 B 之间的依赖性，并且强度偏差的幅度减小。两者都引发了类似的正面分布的积极性，表明异常检测是成功的。至关重要的是，声音强度辨别效应的幅度和 NAD 学习效应的幅度之间存在预测关系。这些结果证明，非语言领域的 NAD 学习在 3 岁儿童中具有功能，并且基本听觉过程也与语言领域之外的高阶听觉规律的学习有关。