Syntactic, lexical, and phonological/phonetic knowledge are vital aspects of macro level language ability. Prior research has predominantly focused on environmental or cortical sources of individual differences in these areas; however, a growing literature suggests an auditory brainstem contribution to language performance in both typically developing (TD) populations and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study investigates whether one aspect of auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), neural response stability, which is a metric reflecting trial-by-trial consistency in the neural encoding of sound, can predict syntactic, lexical, and phonetic performance in TD and ASD school-aged children. Pooling across children with ASD and TD, results showed that higher neural stability in response to the syllable /da/ was associated with better phonetic discrimination, and with better syntactic performance on a standardized measure. Furthermore, phonetic discrimination was a successful mediator of the relationship between neural stability and syntactic performance. This study supports the growing body of literature that stable subcortical neural encoding of sound is important for successful language performance.

中文翻译：

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语音辨别介导听觉脑干反应稳定性与句法表现之间的关系

句法、词汇和语音/语音知识是宏观语言能力的重要方面。先前的研究主要集中在这些领域个体差异的环境或皮质来源；然而，越来越多的文献表明听觉脑干对正常发育 (TD) 人群和自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 儿童的语言表现有贡献。这项研究调查了听觉脑干反应 (ABR) 的一个方面，即神经反应稳定性，这是反映声音神经编码中逐次试验一致性的指标，是否可以预测 TD 和 ASD 学校的句法、词汇和语音表现-年龄的孩子。汇集 ASD 和 TD 儿童，结果表明，响应音节 /da/ 的更高神经稳定性与更好的语音辨别力有关，并且在标准化测量中具有更好的句法性能。此外，语音辨别是神经稳定性和句法表现之间关系的成功中介。这项研究支持越来越多的文献，即稳定的皮层下神经编码对成功的语言表现很重要。