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Published on: April 19, 2017
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Six-month-old infants' perception of structural regularities in speech
Irene de la Cruz-Pavía1, Judit Gervain2
1Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain; Basque Foundation for Science Ikerbasque, Bilbao, Spain; Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, CNRS & Université Paris Cité, Paris, France.
Cognition
|June 28, 2023
Summary
Six-month-old infants can process speech with varying syllable patterns, not just identical ones. This early ability to detect differences in speech is crucial for language development before word learning begins.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants must extract linguistic regularities for grammar acquisition.
- Newborns detect identity-based regularities (e.g., ABB) but not diversity-based ones (e.g., ABC).
- The ability to process diverse sequences is essential for understanding words, typically emerging around 6 months.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if 6-month-old infants can represent speech sequences with diversity-based structures.
- To determine the neural basis of processing both repetition- and diversity-based sequences in early infancy.
Main Methods:
- Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to measure brain activity in 6-month-old infants.
- Infants were exposed to auditory stimuli containing repetition-based (e.g., mubaba) and diversity-based (e.g., mubage) syllable sequences.
- Neural responses were analyzed in bilateral temporal, parietal, and frontal brain regions.
Main Results:
- Six-month-olds demonstrated discrimination of both repetition- and diversity-based structures.
- Infants showed significant neural activation to both types of sequences in frontal and parietal regions, compared to baseline.
- This indicates that infants at this age can encode sequences involving differences in syllables.
Conclusions:
- By 6 months of age, infants possess the neural capacity to represent diversity-based structures in speech.
- This finding provides the earliest evidence to date of prelexical infants encoding differences in auditory stimuli.
- This ability precedes behavioral evidence of such processing, which is typically observed at 11 months.
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