Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 11, 2025
Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Developmental Trajectory of the Frequency-Following Response During the First 6 Months of Life
Teresa Ribas-Prats1,2,3, Gaël Cordero1,2,3, Diana Lucia Lip-Sosa3,4
1Brainlab - Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Spain.
Purpose:
The aim of the present study is to characterize the maturational changes during the first 6 months of life in the neural encoding of two speech sound features relevant for early language acquisition: the stimulus fundamental frequency (fo), related to stimulus pitch, and the vowel formant composition, particularly F1. The frequency-following response (FFR) was used as a snapshot into the neural encoding of these two stimulus attributes.
Method:
FFRs to a consonant-vowel stimulus /da/ were retrieved from electroencephalographic recordings in a sample of 80 healthy infants (45 at birth and 35 at the age of 1 month). Thirty-two infants (16 recorded at birth and 16 recorded at 1 month) returned for a second recording at 6 months of age.
Results:
Stimulus fo and F1 encoding showed improvements from birth to 6 months of age. Most remarkably, a significant improvement in the F1 neural encoding was observed during the first month of life.
Conclusion:
Our results highlight the rapid and sustained maturation of the basic neural machinery necessary for the phoneme discrimination ability during the first 6 months of age.
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