Comparison of event-related potentials of young children and adults in a visual recognition and word reading task.

Investigated differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) of 12 young children (aged 5-6 yrs) and 10 young adults (aged 20-32 yrs) who were required to perform a word-reading and a picture-recognition task. Principal components analyses were performed on the averaged ERPs in 2 ways: (a) separately for each of 4 combinations of tasks and age groups and (b) separately for each age group (pooled across tasks). Results demonstrate that children's ERPs were characterized by a long-latency negative component (N500) and a slow positive wave (SW) component, and adults' ERPs were characterized by 2 late positive components (P340 and SW). Both children and adults showed an earlier positive component that varied in peak latency between 280 msec for children and 240 msec for adults. Adults showed a marked increase in SW positivity in the word-reading task as compared with the picture-recognition task, while task effects were less manifest in the components of children. Results support the notion that children and adults differ both in speed and mode of processing under the different task requirements.