Building on years of research using EEG to explore the relationship between speech perception and language development in children, this NSTC-funded three year research project adopts ad-vanced neural synchrony paradigms to capture how the brain aligns with both speech signals (brain-to-speech entrainment) and conversational partners (brain-to-brain synchrony). This marks a methodo-logical breakthrough, enabling a more ecologically valid approach to studying real-time communica-tion in naturalistic contexts.

This is the first study to investigate brain-speech synchrony in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), revealing how tonal language properties influence neural processing. Additionally, by simultaneously analyzing intra-brain and inter-brain synchronization, the project addresses a critical gap in understanding how language comprehension unfolds during interac-tive communication. The findings may inform future interventions targeting neural synchrony to sup-port language development in children with comprehension difficulties.

In the pilot phase, EEG data are being collected from adult Mandarin speakers listening to sto-ries, analyzed using Temporal Response Function (TRF) modeling. Six participants have completed testing, and the preliminary data confirmed the stability of the experimental paradigm. Following this phase, the same paradigm will be applied to typically developing children to establish normative de-velopmental benchmarks, which will serve as a crucial reference for identifying atypical patterns in children with DLD.

We believe this study not only contributes novel insights into the neural basis of DLD, but also advances the methodological frontier of developmental language research. Its findings may inform fu-ture interventions targeting neural synchrony to support language development in children with com-prehension difficulties.

Keywords：Developmental language disorders (DLD), speech perception deficit, interbrain synchronization, brain to speech entrainment