Neural correlates of infant accent discrimination: an fNIRS study
Alejandrina Cristia1, Yasuyo Minagawa-Kawai, Natalia Egorova
1Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; Neurobiology of Language, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
The present study investigated the neural correlates of infant discrimination of very similar linguistic varieties (Quebecois and Parisian French) using functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy. In line with previous behavioral and electrophysiological data, there was no evidence that 3-month-olds discriminated the two regional accents, whereas 5-month-olds did, with the locus of discrimination in left anterior perisylvian regions. These neuroimaging results suggest that a developing language network relying crucially on left perisylvian cortices sustains infants' discrimination of similar linguistic varieties within this early period of infancy.
