Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Nallet, Caroline; Gervain, Judit

doi:10.1146/annurev-devpsych-050620-025732

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 106 publications

(107 reference statements)

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“…At the neural level, the localization in right temporal areas of the differential response found in the current study fits well with the previous literature on hemispheric specialization for speech processing in the adult (Poeppel, 2014) and infant (Dehaene‐Lambertz & Spelke, 2015; Nallet & Gervain, 2021) brain. It is usually argued that the brain shows a left hemispheric or bilateral dominance for processing segmental (i.e., phonological) content, while the perception of supra‐segmental (i.e., prosodic) information elicits a right hemispheric dominance.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Newborns discriminate utterance‐level prosodic contours

Martinez‐Alvarez

Benavides-Varela

Lapillonne

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate well‐formed utterance‐level prosodic contours from ill‐formed, backward prosodic contours at birth. This deviant prosodic contour was obtained by time‐reversing the original one, and super‐imposing it on the otherwise intact segmental information. The resulting backward prosodic contour was thus unfamiliar to the infants and ill‐formed in French. We used near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) in 1‐3‐day‐old French newborns (n = 25) to measure their brain responses to well‐formed contours as standards and their backward prosody counterparts as deviants in the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas bilaterally. A cluster‐based permutation test revealed greater responses to the Deviant than to the Standard condition in right temporal areas. These results suggest that newborns are already capable of detecting utterance‐level prosodic violations at birth, a key ability for breaking into the native language, and that this ability is supported by brain areas similar to those in adults. Research Highlights At birth, infants have sophisticated speech perception abilities. Prosody may be particularly important for early language development. We show that newborns are already capable of discriminating utterance‐level prosodic contours. This discrimination can be localized to the right hemisphere of the neonate brain.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Newborns discriminate utterance‐level prosodic contours

Martinez‐Alvarez

Benavides-Varela

Lapillonne

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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“…It is traditionally thought that fetuses cannot acquire temporal patterns faster than prosodic modulations mainly because the former cannot be heard in the womb (for reviews, see Gervain, 2018; Nallet & Gervain, 2021). Indeed, the maternal tissue that surrounds the fetus acts as a low-pass filter that limits the conduction of high-frequency sound (Fig.…”

Section: Early Low-pass Filtering Of Speech: the Womb Versus The Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Electrophysiological Maturation Shape Language Acquisition?

Menn

Männel

Meyer

2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

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Infants master temporal patterns of their native language at a developmental trajectory from slow to fast: Shortly after birth, they recognize the slow acoustic modulations specific to their native language before tuning into faster language-specific patterns between 6 and 12 months of age. We propose here that this trajectory is constrained by neuronal maturation—in particular, the gradual emergence of high-frequency neural oscillations in the infant electroencephalogram. Infants’ initial focus on slow prosodic modulations is consistent with the prenatal availability of slow electrophysiological activity (i.e., theta- and delta-band oscillations). Our proposal is consistent with the temporal patterns of infant-directed speech, which initially amplifies slow modulations, approaching the faster modulation range of adult-directed speech only as infants’ language has advanced sufficiently. Moreover, our proposal agrees with evidence from premature infants showing maturational age is a stronger predictor of language development than ex utero exposure to speech, indicating that premature infants cannot exploit their earlier availability of speech because of electrophysiological constraints. In sum, we provide a new perspective on language acquisition emphasizing neuronal development as a critical driving force of infants’ language development.

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“…This experience will indeed contribute and facilitate the appropriate identification of native language phonemes by the age of six months (Best et al, 2016; Cheour et al, 1998; Kuhl et al, 1992). Moreover, a perceptual re-organization by the age of six months has been previously proposed, suggesting an attentional shift from syllabic units at birth to phonemic units at six months, cues that are more relevant for word and grammar learning (Nallet & Gervain, 2021; Ortiz Barajas et al, 2021). A rich extrauterine auditory environment is key in the improvement of phonemic categories perception in early language acquisition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Longitudinal trajectories of the neural encoding mechanisms of speech-sound features during the first year of life

Puertollano,

Ribas-Prats,

Gorina-Careta

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Infants learn to recognize the sounds of their mother language very early in development, exhibiting a remarkable ability to process the fine-grained spectrotemporal characteristics of speech. However, the neural machinery underlying this ability is not yet understood. Here, we used an auditory evoked potential termed frequency-following response (FFR) to unravel the maturational pattern of the neural encoding of two speech sound characteristics: voice pitch and temporal fine structure, during the first year of life. The FFR was elicited to a two-vowel stimulus (/oa/) in a sample of 41 healthy-term neonates that were tested at birth and retested at the ages of six and twelve months. Results revealed a shortening of neural phase-locking time to stimulus envelope from birth to six months, with no further difference between six and twelve months. While neural encoding of voice pitch was similar across age, encoding of the stimulus temporal fine structure exhibited a rapid maturation from birth to six months, without further improvement from this age onwards. Results highlight the first six months of age as a crucial period in the maturation of the neural encoding mechanisms of the temporal fine structure of speech sounds, essential for phoneme discrimination during early language acquisition.

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Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Cited by 15 publications

References 106 publications

Newborns discriminate utterance‐level prosodic contours

Newborns discriminate utterance‐level prosodic contours

Does Electrophysiological Maturation Shape Language Acquisition?

Longitudinal trajectories of the neural encoding mechanisms of speech-sound features during the first year of life

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