Newborns discriminate utterance-level prosodic contours.
brain lateralization
language acquisition
near-infrared spectroscopy
newborns
prosody
speech perception
utterance
Journal
Developmental science
ISSN: 1467-7687
Titre abrégé: Dev Sci
Pays: England
ID NLM: 9814574
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
03 2023
03 2023
Historique:
revised:
13
05
2022
received:
19
10
2021
accepted:
27
06
2022
pubmed:
17
7
2022
medline:
22
2
2023
entrez:
16
7
2022
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
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.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e13304Informations de copyright
© 2022 The Authors. Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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