Does Electrophysiological Maturation Shape Language Acquisition?

Abstract

Infants master temporal patterns of their native language at a developmental trajectory from slow to fast: Shortly after birth, they recognize the slow acoustic modulations specific to their native language before tuning into faster language-specific patterns between 6 and 12 months of age. We propose here that this trajectory is constrained by neuronal maturation—in particular, the gradual emergence of high-frequency neural oscillations in the infant electroencephalogram. Infants’ initial focus on slow prosodic modulations is consistent with the prenatal availability of slow electrophysiological activity (i.e., theta- and delta-band oscillations). Our proposal is consistent with the temporal patterns of infant-directed speech, which initially amplifies slow modulations, approaching the faster modulation range of adult-directed speech only as infants’ language has advanced sufficiently. Moreover, our proposal agrees with evidence from premature infants showing maturational age is a stronger predictor of language development than ex utero exposure to speech, indicating that premature infants cannot exploit their earlier availability of speech because of electrophysiological constraints. In sum, we provide a new perspective on language acquisition emphasizing neuronal development as a critical driving force of infants’ language development.

The developmental trajectory of functional excitation‐inhibition balance relates to language abilities in autistic and allistic children

“…Future longitudinal studies are needed to assess how the developmental trajectory of EI balance in adolescence relates to EI development during infancy and whether greater deviances from the typical EI development during childhood and adolescence associate with greater deviances in infancy already. Importantly, the identification of a relationship between EI balances and language ability in the current study thus not only offers compelling evidence supporting the relevance of EI imbalances in contributing to language differences observed in individuals with autism, but it also lays a crucial foundation for future investigations within the broader domain of language acquisition, where the intricate interplay between EI balance and language development has received limited attention yet (also see Menn et al, 2023).…”

“…How to cite this article: Plueckebaum, H., Meyer, L., Beck, A.-K., & Menn, K. H. (2023). The developmental trajectory of functional excitation-inhibition balance relates to language abilities in autistic and allistic children.…”

Phonological acquisition depends on the timing of speech sounds: Deconvolution EEG modeling across the first five years

“…We analyzed whether the acquisition of phonological feature learning may be an extension of infants' initial focus on prosody in speech processing (14). More specifically, we thought that the Fig.…”

“…Yet even at 7.5 months of age, infants fail to dissociate 70-ms-long sounds that are separated by less than ∼75 ms ( 13 ). We have recently proposed that this slowness is explained by neurobiological immaturity at birth ( 14 ): Fast electrophysiological activity that is required for phoneme-rate auditory and feature processing ( 9 , 15 ) only emerges after birth and approaches adult speeds across infancy and childhood ( 16 – 18 ). In line with this temporal constraint, newborns initially focus on slow prosodic modulations (i.e., long units) of speech, shifting toward smaller (i.e., faster) units only later [e.g., syllables and phonemes ( 14 , 19 )].…”

Associations between EEG power and coherence with cognition and early precursors of speech and language development across the first months of life

“…These findings provide some evidence that ERPs can be used as potential early indicators of later language and neurocognition. It has been proposed that the developmental trajectory of language, in which infants recognize the acoustic modulations of their native language at birth and then tune into language specific patterns towards the end of the first year of life, is limited by neuronal maturation [ 23 ]. In other words, the gradual emergence of high frequency neural oscillations in infant EEG constrains language development.…”