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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

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Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
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Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location01:21

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The human brain perceives pitch through two primary mechanisms reflected in place theory and frequency theory. Each mechanism describes how sound waves are interpreted as specific pitches by the brain, offering insights into the intricate processes of auditory perception.
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Auditory Perception01:17

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The auditory system is essential for sound perception, utilizing various critical structures. When sound waves enter the outer ear, they travel through the ear canal and cause the eardrum to vibrate. These vibrations are then transmitted to the middle ear, where three tiny bones – the malleus, incus, and stapes – amplify the sound. This amplification is crucial, as it ensures that the sound vibrations are strong enough to be conveyed to the inner ear. These vibrations then reach the...
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Hearing01:31

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When we hear a sound, our nervous system is detecting sound waves—pressure waves of mechanical energy traveling through a medium. The frequency of the wave is perceived as pitch, while the amplitude is perceived as loudness.
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Perception of Sound Waves01:01

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The human ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies in the audible range. It may perceive sound waves with the same pressure but different frequencies as having different loudness. Moreover, the perception of sound waves depends on the health of an individual's ears, which decays with age. The health of one's ears may also be affected by regular exposure to loud noises.
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Auditory pathways constitute the complex neural circuits responsible for transmitting and interpreting auditory information from the peripheral auditory system to the brain. Sound waves are initially captured by the outer ear, funneled through the ear canal, and reach the tympanic membrane (eardrum). These vibrations are transmitted via the middle ear's ossicles to the inner ear's cochlea.
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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
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Newborns discriminate utterance-level prosodic contours.

Anna Martinez-Alvarez1,2, Silvia Benavides-Varela1, Alexandre Lapillonne3

  • 1Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.

Developmental Science
|July 16, 2022
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Newborn infants can detect unnatural speech prosody at birth. This sophisticated speech perception ability, crucial for language development, is supported by the right hemisphere of the neonate brain.

Keywords:
brain lateralizationlanguage acquisitionnear-infrared spectroscopynewbornsprosodyspeech perceptionutterance

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental neuroscience
  • Speech and language processing
  • Cognitive science

Background:

  • Prosody is essential for spoken language, conveying critical linguistic information.
  • Early sensitivity to prosody is vital for infant language acquisition.
  • The developmental trajectory of prosodic perception at birth remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether newborns can discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed utterance-level prosodic contours.
  • To determine the neural correlates of prosodic discrimination in neonates.
  • To explore the early emergence of sophisticated speech perception abilities.

Main Methods:

  • Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to measure brain activity in 25 French newborns (1-3 days old).
  • A passive listening paradigm presented well-formed prosodic contours as standards and time-reversed, ill-formed contours as deviants.
  • Brain responses were analyzed in frontal, temporal, and parietal areas bilaterally using cluster-based permutation tests.

Main Results:

  • Newborns exhibited significantly greater brain responses to the deviant (ill-formed) prosodic contours compared to the standard (well-formed) contours.
  • This enhanced response was primarily localized to the right temporal areas of the brain.
  • The findings indicate a specific neural sensitivity to prosodic violations in neonates.

Conclusions:

  • Newborn infants demonstrate an innate ability to detect violations in utterance-level prosody shortly after birth.
  • This early prosodic discrimination ability is supported by right-hemisphere brain regions, similar to adult processing.
  • These findings highlight the fundamental role of prosody in early language development and the sophistication of neonatal speech perception.