Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Abstract

Learning a spoken language presupposes efficient auditory functions. In the present event-related potential study, we tested whether and how basic auditory processes are related to online learning of a linguistic rule in infants and adults. Participants listened to frequent standard stimuli, which were interspersed with infrequent pitch deviants and rule deviants, violating a nonadjacent dependency between two syllables. Only infants who showed the more mature mismatch response for the pitch deviants (i.e., a negativity) showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. Concordantly, the small group of adults who showed evidence of rule learning showed larger mismatch effects for pitch processing. We conclude that the ability to extract linguistic rules develops in early infancy and is tightly linked to functional aspects of basic auditory mechanisms.language acquisition | AXB rules | pitch perception | mismatch negativity H uman language is based on an acoustically transmitted signal. The successful language learner needs to decode the linguistic content of a complex auditory signal into its component units and their relation to each other, thus deriving words and rules. Although sufficient speech input is widely considered to be crucial for language learning, the perceptual abilities that form the gateway to spoken language have long been neglected in first and second language acquisition research. Basic auditory perception may, however, be an important determinant of language learning processes across the range of normal and abnormal development.There is empirical evidence supporting the idea that early auditory abilities impact on later outcomes of language development in normal infants and populations with language-related disorders (1-3). Furthermore, auditory brainstem responses in language-impaired children suggest that low-level auditory processes contribute to the pathogenesis of language disorders (4). In adults, individual differences in perceptual abilities correlate with language-processing abilities in their native and a second language (5, 6). The findings suggest a potential causal relationship between basic auditory processing ability and the efficiency of language learning in infancy and adulthood.Although infants do not produce complex language in their first year of life, they show remarkable abilities to extract regular patterns from speech input early on. Eight-month-old infants, and even newborns, have been shown to be sensitive to transitional probabilities between syllables defining word-like units (7,8). Syllable repetitions can be detected from birth (9) and dependencies between nonadjacent units of speech can be detected as early as 4 mo of age (10). Learners seem to be able to exploit various distributional and acoustic cues to detect words and rules in speech input. Infants, for example, take advantage of prosodic cues for detecting possible words in the linguistic input (11). Similarly, prosodic cues seem to assist adults' extraction of grammatical patterns from speech input (12, 1...

Effect of maturation on suprasegmental speech processing in full- and preterm infants: A mismatch negativity study

“…different generators or listening strategies or maturity) determining the differences in speech perception processes. Furthermore, in their recent study, Mueller, Friederici, and Mannel (2012) divide infants by the polarity of their mismatch response and as a result of matching the electrophysiological responses to behavioral results, argue that the positive MMR is a correlate of immature stimulus comparison. In an early study Näätänen, Simpson, and Loveless (1982) called the slightly differing deviants as 'proximates.'…”

Word stress processing in specific language impairment: Auditory or representational deficits?

“…It remains largely unresolved, which of those are crucial in SLI and whether there are subtypes of impaired word stress processing affecting different processing levels. Regarding the perceptual stage, it is well known that auditory processing abilities are a significant predictor for later language development (Benasich & Tallal, 2002;Benasich, Thomas, Choudhury, & Leppänen, 2002;Mueller, Friederici, & Männel, 2012). Moreover, a large proportion of children with SLI are typically found to have auditory processing deficits (Corriveau, Pasquini, & Goswami, 2007;Davids et al, 2011;McArthur & Bishop, 2004;McArthur, Ellis, Atkinson, & Coltheart, 2008;Sharma, Purdy, & Kelly, 2009;Wong, Ciocca, & Yung, 2009;Wright et al, 1997).…”

The effect of gender on a frequency discrimination task in children

“…While this can be explained by differences between the genders in the anatomy of the brain, further investigation is warranted in order to resolve an apparent discrepancy between the males' advantage in basic temporal processing capabilities and the females' advantage in linguistic related skills (e.g., early talkers [43]; increased language production and vocabulary [44][45][46]). This is particularly intriguing because temporal processing abilities, frequency discrimination included, are considered essential for efficient and accurate speech processing [47,48]. Thus, more research is necessary in order to explore whether sex-related differences exist for other psychophysical tasks that involve different aspects of auditory processing.…”