Emerging attunement to native phonotactics in French-learning infants: A developmental event-related potential study

Early sensitivity to phonotactic probabilities and restrictions suggests that infants may also perceptually repair illegal sequences, as do adult speakers, demonstrating attunement to their language-specific speech input. Here, we report, for the first time, neural evidence for phonotactic repair in French-learning 7-, 11-, and 14-month-old infants, investigating the */tl/>/kl/ repair. Infants were presented with /pla/-/tla/ (different), /kla/-/tla/ (repair), and /tla/-/tla/ (same) trials using a precursor-target (habituation-dishabituation) paradigm. The ERPs were analyzed in response to /tla/ targets. The repair effect was defined as no difference in ERP amplitudes between repair and same trials, together with a significant difference between repair and different trials. Our results demonstrated that both age and amplitude polarity (in response to different versus same trials) interacted with the repair effect. Infants with more positive amplitudes in response to different than same trials within a 100-300 ms time window (positive responders) demonstrated a repair effect independent of their age. In contrast, for infants with more negative amplitudes in response to different than same trials (negative responders), the repair effect emerged only at 14 months of age. Our findings establish that the neural mechanisms underpinning phonotactic development are in place earlier than previously thought (in some infants), further emphasizing that individual maturation and age are in interplay in early language development.