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Updated: Jul 23, 2026

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a
Rochelle Newman1, Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ann Marie Jusczyk
1Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742, USA. rnewman@hesp.umd.edu
Abstract:
Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary. Study 2 assessed linguistic and cognitive skills at 4-6 years of age for children who had participated in segmentation studies as infants. Children who had been able to segment words from fluent speech scored higher on language measures, but not general IQ, as preschoolers. Results suggest that speech segmentation ability is an important prerequisite for successful language development, and they offer potential for developing measures to detect language impairment at an earlier age.
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