Children with developmental language disorder show selective impairments in low-frequency neural tracking of speech.

Children with developmental language disorder show reduced low-frequency speech-brain coherence in the 0.9–2.5 Hz range, with strongest effects in left supramarginal gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus.

• Why it matters: Temporal Sampling theory predicts that slow neural tracking supports prosodic and syllabic structure extraction, but it was unclear whether these automatic mechanisms differ in DLD.
• What they did: MEG recordings during story listening compared children with and without DLD, measuring source-level lagged speech-brain coherence and frequency-specific cortical functional connectivity across bilateral cortical regions.
• The result: DLD was linked to lower coherence at 0.9–2.5 Hz (left supramarginal gyrus p<0.001; right inferior frontal gyrus p=0.001) and at 2.5–5 Hz in right temporal regions (all p<0.02), and stronger low-frequency coherence related to better language performance.

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