Cortical tracking of lexical speech units in a multi-talker background is immature in school-aged children

Abstract Children have more difficulty perceiving speech in noise than adults. Whether these difficulties relate to immature processing of prosodic or linguistic elements of the attended speech is still unclear. To address the impact of noise on linguistic processing per se , we assessed how acoustic noise impacts the cortical tracking of intelligible speech devoid of prosody in school-aged children and adults. Twenty adults and twenty children (7-9 years) listened to synthesized French monosyllabic words presented at 2.5 Hz, either randomly or in 4-word hierarchical structures wherein 2 words formed a phrase, and 2 phrases formed a sentence, with or without babble noise. Neuromagnetic responses to words, phrases and sentences were identified and source-localized. Children and adults displayed significant cortical tracking of words in all conditions, and of phrases and sentences only when words formed meaningful sentences. In children compared with adults, cortical tracking of linguistic units was lower for all units in conditions without noise, and similarly impacted by the addition of babble noise for phrase and sentence units. Critically, when there was noise, adults increased the cortical tracking of monosyllabic words in the inferior frontal gyri but children did not. This study demonstrates that the difficulties of school-aged children in understanding speech in a multi-talker background might be partly due to an immature identification of lexical but not supra-lexical linguistic units. Highlights Children track the hierarchical linguistic units of clear speech devoid of prosody This cortical tracking is left-hemisphere dominant as the adult brain Babble noise reduces cortical tracking of sentences in children and adults Unlike adults, children are not able to enhance cortical tracking of words in noise