Integrated sentence-level speech perception evokes strengthened language networks and facilitates early speech...

Area of Science:

• Developmental Neuroscience
• Speech Perception
• Language Acquisition

Background:

• Poetic speech, characterized by prosodic regularities, is easily memorized by children.
• Harmonious acoustic patterns in poetry may facilitate integrated sentence processing in early development.
• The neural basis and developmental benefits of processing poetic utterances in children remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the specific neural pathways children use to perceive poetic utterances.
• To determine if processing poetic speech benefits children's overall speech development.
• To examine the developmental trajectory of poetic speech perception from early childhood to adolescence.

Main Methods:

• Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to record hemodynamic changes in 94 children (ages 2-12) and 73 adults.
• Participants listened to both poetic and non-poetic natural sentences.
• Brain activity patterns were compared between children and adults, and correlated with speech performance metrics.

Main Results:

• Poetic sentence perception involves a highly integrated process with lower brain workload in both children and adults.
• Children, unlike adults, exhibited an early-activated large-scale network for poetic speech, coordinated by connectivity hubs.
• Poetic speech activated phonological encoding regions in children, with this activation decreasing with age; these neural responses correlated positively with speech fluency and semantics.

Conclusions:

• Children demonstrate a distinct neural sensitivity to integrated speech perception, particularly in poetic forms.
• This sensitivity facilitates early speech development by enhancing sophisticated language networks and the perception-production circuit.
• Poetic speech processing in children supports the development of crucial communication skills, including fluency and semantic understanding.