Abstract
Words and melodies are some of the basic elements infants are able to extract early in life from the auditory input. Whether melodic cues contained in songs can facilitate word-form extraction immediately after birth remained unexplored. Here, we provided converging neural and computational evidence of the early benefit of melodies for language acquisition. Twenty-eight neonates were tested on their ability to extract word-forms from continuous flows of sung and spoken syllabic sequences. We found different brain dynamics for sung and spoken streams and observed successful detection of word-form violations in the sung condition only. Furthermore, neonatal brain responses for sung streams predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months as demonstrated by multiple regression and cross-validation analyses. These findings suggest that early neural individual differences in prosodic speech processing might be a good indicator of later language outcomes and could be considered as a relevant factor in the development of infants’ language skills.
Highlights
Measures, seven- to nine-month-old infants have been shown to use statistical information to extract word-form units from speech streams[22]
In order to explore the link between EEG signatures of early speech segmentation and expressive vocabulary at 18 months, we used Pearson correlations, linear multiple regression and cross-validation procedures with the EEG features reflecting the learning brain dynamics, as well as the significant mismatch response (MMR) found during the test phases of the melodically enriched condition, as predictive indices
Our results indicate that during the learning phase, melodically enriched and flat contour streams elicited different event-related brain potentials (ERPs) modulations through exposure
Summary
Measures, seven- to nine-month-old infants have been shown to use statistical information to extract word-form units from speech streams[22]. A recent EEG study has provided the first experimental evidence showing that IDS may facilitate statistical learning in sleeping neonates This facilitation was reflected by enhanced brain responses for IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) material and confirmed the benefit of prosodic cues on early word-form segmentation[29]. Considering recent data obtained with IDS material[29], our working hypothesis was that melodic cues consistently coupled with statistical information in the sung streams would enhance speech segmentation in neonates This benefit should be reflected during the learning phase by different dynamics of the ERP components elicited by melodically enriched and flat contour speech streams. We hypothesized that neonatal brain sensitivity to melodically enriched speech streams could be predictive of expressive vocabulary at 18 months of age
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