Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life

Abstract

Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4-6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however to date no cortical tracking study could investigate the emergence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically-invariant phonetic encoding over the first year of life, providing the first direct evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By 11 months of age, however, infants still did not exhibit adult-like encoding.

Cortical over-representation of phonetic onsets of ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals

“…The PhCat metric (FS-S gain) may reflect the EEG encoding of the timing of phonetic feature categories, as well as their identity (Di Liberto et al, 2015;Di Liberto et al, 2021;Liberto et al, 2022). To assess if either or both these properties were encoded in the EEG signals, we also compared the FS-S predictive performance with the results of the same analysis after shuffling the phoneme identities in the transcript, which resulted in the PhOnset metric (FshS-S gain).…”