Synchronizing with the rhythm: Infant neural entrainment to complex musical and speech stimuli

Abstract

Neural entrainment is defined as the process whereby brain activity, and more specifically neuronal oscillations measured by EEG, synchronize with exogenous stimulus rhythms. Despite the importance that neural oscillations have assumed in recent years in the field of auditory neuroscience and speech perception, in human infants the oscillatory brain rhythms and their synchronization with complex auditory exogenous rhythms are still relatively unexplored. In the present study, we investigate infant neural entrainment to complex non-speech (musical) and speech rhythmic stimuli; we provide a developmental analysis to explore potential similarities and differences between infants’ and adults’ ability to entrain to the stimuli; and we analyze the associations between infants’ neural entrainment measures and the concurrent level of development. 25 8-month-old infants were included in the study. Their EEG signals were recorded while they passively listened to non-speech and speech rhythmic stimuli modulated at different rates. In addition, Bayley Scales were administered to all infants to assess their cognitive, language, and social-emotional development. Neural entrainment to the incoming rhythms was measured in the form of peaks emerging from the EEG spectrum at frequencies corresponding to the rhythm envelope. Analyses of the EEG spectrum revealed clear responses above the noise floor at frequencies corresponding to the rhythm envelope, suggesting that – similarly to adults – infants at 8 months of age were capable of entraining to the incoming complex auditory rhythms. Infants’ measures of neural entrainment were associated with concurrent measures of cognitive and social-emotional development.

The Effect of Visual Speech Cues on Neural Tracking of Speech in 10-month-old Infants

“…Neural tracking was observed in both speech that was fully audiovisual (AV-condition), in which the speaker's face was fully visible, and in the audiovisual-blocked (AV-Blocked) condition, where the speaker's visual speech cues were occluded with a block. These results are consistent with other recent findings demonstrating infants' neural tracking of auditoryonly and audiovisual speech (Attaheri, Ní Choisdealbha, Di Liberto, et al, 2022;Cantiani et al, 2022;Çetinçelik et al, 2023;Jessen et al, 2019;Kalashnikova et al, 2018;Menn, Michel, et al, 2022;Menn, Ward, et al, 2022;Ortiz Barajas et al, 2021;Power et al, 2012;Tan et al, 2022).…”

“…Successful neural tracking of the speech envelope has been repeatedly demonstrated in infants and young children (Attaheri, Ní Choisdealbha, Di Liberto, et al, 2022;Cantiani et al, 2022;Çetinçelik et al, 2023;Jessen et al, 2019;Kalashnikova et al, 2018;Menn, Michel, et al, 2022;Menn, Ward, et al, 2022;Ortiz Barajas et al, 2021;Power et al, 2012;Tan et al, 2022), and infants' neural speech tracking at the stress and syllable rate has been linked to their later vocabulary outcomes (Attaheri, Ní Choisdealbha, Di Liberto, et al, 2022;Çetinçelik et al, 2023;Menn, Ward, et al, 2022;. Yet, only a few studies have investigated whether infants' and children's neural tracking is enhanced in the presence of audiovisual speech cues.…”

Auditory influences on walking: Children’s walking to the beat.

“…Developmentally, it has been suggested that the perception of timing and rhythm are the primary building blocks for complex auditory perception (Trainor & Marsh-Rollo, 2019), with dramatic abilities to process and discriminate auditory rhythms evident within the first few months of life (Baruch & Drake, 1997;Lewkowicz, 2003;Winkler et al, 2009). And in keeping with the mechanism of auditorymotor entrainment just described, rhythmic patterns entrain neural activity in infants as young as 7 months, as demonstrated by EEG responses being frequency-locked to rhythmic patterns (Cantiani et al, 2022;Cirelli et al, 2016).…”

Rhythm and music for promoting sensorimotor organization in autism: broader implications for outcomes

“…Rhythmic entrainment occurs in individuals with little to no musical training and has also been shown to persist in the presence of acquired movement disorder including Parkinson’s disease ( Thaut et al, 2001 ; Nombela et al, 2013 ) and stroke ( Thaut et al, 1997 ). Entrainment has also been demonstrated in infants ( Cantiani et al, 2022 ) and children ( LaGasse, 2013 ); however, there is evidence that perception action coordination may impact volitional movement accuracy ( Volman and Geuze, 2000 ). Although children have been shown to have the ability to entrain, children with developmental disabilities have demonstrated difficulties with rhythmic entrainment and/or timing ( Lense et al, 2021 ).…”

“…), researchers have shown the ability for individuals to spontaneously organize musical stimuli according to the meter and move to the stimulus ( Burger et al, 2018 ). Furthermore, neural entrainment to the metric organization of musical stimuli has been shown in adults ( Tierney and Kraus, 2015 ) and in children as young as 8 months ( Cantiani et al, 2022 ). Researchers have suggested that the neural response to meter-related frequencies occurs both at the subcortical and cortical level, with functional connections between the auditory cortex and motor structures ( Nozaradan et al, 2018 ).…”