Infants’ Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary

Abstract

Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size. In a passive listening ERP study, 10.5 month-old Dutch infants were exposed to rhyming and non-rhyming child songs. Two types of rhyme effects were analysed: (1) ERPs elicited by the first rhyme occurring in each song (rhyme sensitivity) and (2) ERPs elicited by rhymes repeating after the first rhyme in each song (rhyme repetition). Only for the latter a tentative negativity for rhymes from 0 to 200 ms after the onset of the rhyme word was found. This rhyme repetition effect correlated with productive vocabulary at 18 months-old, but not with any other vocabulary measure (perception at 10.5 or 18 months-old). While awaiting future replication, the study indicates precursors of phonological awareness already during infancy and with ecologically valid linguistic stimuli.

Children’s Neural Sensitivity to Prosodic Features of Natural Speech and Its Significance to Speech Development in Cochlear Implanted Children

“…One possible reason for such time-wise imbalanced selectivity was that the rhythmic features in SP speech could be integrated in a short time and facilitate semantic retrieval. In EEG studies that had a high temporal resolution, prosodic information, such as rhyme congruity ( Chen et al, 2016 ; Hahn et al, 2021 ) was shown to be processed as early as 200 ms after stimuli onset. Its temporal priority in the auditory speech processing was much higher than that of syntactic and semantic information which have been claimed to be processed in the late time window of 400–1,000 ms, i.e., widely recognized ERP components of N400 and P600 ( Zhang et al, 2013 ; Delogu et al, 2019 ).…”