Abstract
The ability to extract word forms from continuous speech is a prerequisite for constructing a vocabulary and emerges in the first year of life. Electrophysiological (ERP) studies of speech segmentation by 9- to 12-month-old listeners in several languages have found a left-localized negativity linked to word onset as a marker of word detection. We report an ERP study showing significant evidence of speech segmentation in Dutch-learning 7-month-olds. In contrast to the left-localized negative effect reported with older infants, the observed overall mean effect had a positive polarity. Inspection of individual results revealed two participant sub-groups: a majority showing a positive-going response, and a minority showing the left negativity observed in older age groups. We retested participants at age three, on vocabulary comprehension and word and sentence production. On every test, children who at 7 months had shown the negativity associated with segmentation of words from speech outperformed those who had produced positive-going brain responses to the same input. The earlier that infants show the left-localized brain responses typically indicating detection of words in speech, the better their early childhood language skills.
Highlights
Spoken language is one of the dimensions of the infant’s environment for which perceptual information is available, processed, and stored even before birth (DeCasper et al, 1994)
The event-related potentials (ERPs) to these unfamiliar versus familiarized isolated tokens seem to differ in two time windows, as Figure 1 shows
The groups differ significantly on the syntax and talkativeness subscales (t 21 = 2.09, p < 0.05, and t 21 = 2.58, p < 0.02, respectively), and there is further a near-significant difference on the articulation subscale (t 21 = 1.82, p = 0.084). These results show that ERPs for word recognition in continuous speech at 7 months are an indication of later language development
Summary
Spoken language is one of the dimensions of the infant’s environment for which perceptual information is available, processed, and stored even before birth (DeCasper et al, 1994). The first year of an infant’s life sees steady continuous growth in the skills required to turn a speech signal into a comprehended message (Saffran et al, 2006). The first spoken words may be produced only at the end of that year, the perceptual skills that make such production possible develop steadily from birth onward. This development is not a passive result of maturation. The infant’s task is to acquire the environmental language(s), and to attend to meaningful perceptual variation where it is required to differentiate relevant contrasts (and to ignore variation that is perceptually detectable, but irrelevant to this particular language). Differences between languages and acoustically salient differences within a language induce differences in the speed and the order with which this phonological task is achieved (Narayan et al, 2010)
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