Infant Directed Speech Enhances Statistical Learning in Newborn Infants: An ERP Study.

Minna Huotilainen,Alexis N. Bosseler,Tuomas Teinonen,Mari Tervaniemi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162177

Minna Huotilainen, Alexis N. Bosseler + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162177

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Sep 12, 2016
Citations: 43	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Helsinki, University of Washington

Abstract

Statistical learning and the social contexts of language addressed to infants are hypothesized to play important roles in early language development. Previous behavioral work has found that the exaggerated prosodic contours of infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitate statistical learning in 8-month-old infants. Here we examined the neural processes involved in on-line statistical learning and investigated whether the use of IDS facilitates statistical learning in sleeping newborns. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while newborns were exposed to12 pseudo-words, six spoken with exaggerated pitch contours of IDS and six spoken without exaggerated pitch contours (ADS) in ten alternating blocks. We examined whether ERP amplitudes for syllable position within a pseudo-word (word-initial vs. word-medial vs. word-final, indicating statistical word learning) and speech register (ADS vs. IDS) would interact. The ADS and IDS registers elicited similar ERP patterns for syllable position in an early 0–100 ms component but elicited different ERP effects in both the polarity and topographical distribution at 200–400 ms and 450–650 ms. These results provide the first evidence that the exaggerated pitch contours of IDS result in differences in brain activity linked to on-line statistical learning in sleeping newborns.

Highlights

A long-standing question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the learning processes that guide language acquisition
Our Event-related potentials (ERPs) results show clear responses in the 0–100 ms, 200–400 ms, and 450–650 ms measurement windows for the 3 syllable positions, and these responses differ for the adult-directed speech (ADS) and infant-directed speech (IDS) registers
We hypothesized that presenting the speech with exaggerated pitch would facilitate statistical learning in sleeping newborns, and more importantly, that the ERPs would vary as a function of two different aspects of the speech stimuli that were manipulated in the current experiment: (1) the transitional probabilities between syllables, and (2) speech register (ADS vs. IDS)

Summary

Introduction

A long-standing question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the learning processes that guide language acquisition. Infants begin life with perceptual abilities that allow them to learn any language, and their perception is shaped by experience with their native language [1,2,3]. Previous research indicates that both infant-directed speech (IDS) and “statistical learning” (the ability to detect the distributional and statistical patterns of phonetic units in language input) play important roles in this process, influencing both phonetic learning and early word learning [4,5,6,7,8]. Exaggerated pitch contours of IDS may benefit early word learning by heightening attention to the input, which in turn expedites the detection of statistical regularities (see [10] for discussion).

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