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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 5, 2026

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

Published on: December 14, 2012

Learning word order at birth: A NIRS study.

Silvia Benavides-Varela¹, Judit Gervain²

¹Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padua, Italy; San Camillo Hospital IRCCS, Venice, Italy.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

|March 30, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Newborn infants can detect word order changes when words are spoken in a list, but not with natural sentence intonation. Prosody is a stronger cue than word order for early language learning.

Keywords:

Near-infrared spectroscopy Newborn infants Prosody Word order

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Published on: April 19, 2017

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Neuroscience
Linguistics

Background:

The grammatical function of word order in language is well-established.
The developmental origins and neural basis of word order processing in infants remain largely unknown.
Understanding early language acquisition requires investigating how infants process sequential linguistic information.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the origins of infants' ability to learn the sequential order of words.
To examine the neural correlates of word order learning using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).
To determine the influence of prosody on newborns' sensitivity to word order.

Main Methods:

Two experiments were conducted with newborn infants using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).
Experiment 1: Infants were exposed to 4-word sequences with list prosody (separate items).
Experiment 2: Infants were exposed to the same sequences with utterance prosody (natural sentence contour).

Main Results:

Newborns detected word order violations in the list prosody condition (Experiment 1).
Newborns did not detect word order violations in the utterance prosody condition (Experiment 2).
Prosody significantly influenced newborns' ability to process word order.

Conclusions:

Newborn infants demonstrate sensitivity to word order in linguistic sequences.
Prosody serves as a more dominant cue than word order for identifying linguistic units at birth.
These findings shed light on the early developmental stages of language processing and the interplay between word order and prosody.