Newborn categorization of vowel‐like sounds

Aldridge, Michelle A.; Stillman, Robert D.; Bower, T. G. R.

doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00167

Cited by 48 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…see Aslin, Jusczyk & Pisoni, 1998). The task of learning language – of word comprehension and articulation and expression – is perhaps initially facilitated by an infant's ability to perceive the phonemic building blocks of spoken language (Aldridge, Stillman & Bower, 2001; Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk & Vigorito, 1971; Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995; Maye, Werker & Gerken, 2002). Moreover, individual differences in such early speech perception abilities have been found to predict language development by 24 months of age in several recent longitudinal studies (Fernald, Perfors & Marchman, 2006; Newman, Ratner, Jusczyk, Jusczyk & Dow, 2006; Tsao, Liu & Kuhl, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze behavior and affect at 6 months: predicting clinical outcomes and language development in typically developing infants and infants at risk for autism

Young

Merin

Rogers

et al. 2009

Developmental Science

323

303

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This paper presents follow-up longitudinal data to research that previously suggested the possibility of abnormal gaze behavior marked by decreased eye contact in a subgroup of 6-month-old infants at risk for autism (Merin et al., 2007). Using eye-tracking data and behavioral data recorded during a live mother-infant interaction involving the still-face procedure, the predictive utility of gaze behavior and affective behaviors at 6 months was examined using diagnostic outcome data obtained longitudinally over the following 18 months. Results revealed that none of the infants previously identified as showing lower rates of eye-contact had any signs of autism at outcome. In contrast, three infants who were diagnosed with autism demonstrated consistent gaze to the eye region and typical affective responses at 6 months. Individual differences in face scanning and affective responsivity during the live interaction were not related to any continuous measures of symptom frequency or symptom severity. In contrast, results of growth curve models for language development revealed significant relationships between face scanning and expressive language. Greater amounts of fixation to the mother’s mouth during live interaction predicted higher levels of expressive language at outcome and greater rates of growth. These findings suggest that although gaze behavior at 6 months may not provide early markers for autism as initially conceived, gaze to the mouth in particular may be useful in predicting individual differences in language development.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaze behavior and affect at 6 months: predicting clinical outcomes and language development in typically developing infants and infants at risk for autism

Young

Merin

Rogers

et al. 2009

Developmental Science

323

303

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“…There is evidence that children with autism are able to understand the what of a motor act (e.g., [29][30][31]. Note however, that the what of the action can be understood in different ways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impairment of actions chains in autism and its possible role in intention understanding

Cattaneo

Fabbri-Destro

Boria

et al. 2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

405

310

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Experiments in monkeys demonstrated that many parietal and premotor neurons coding a specific motor act (e.g., grasping) show a markedly different activation when this act is part of actions that have different goals (e.g., grasping for eating vs. grasping for placing). Many of these ''action-constrained'' neurons have mirror properties firing selectively to the observation of the initial motor act of the actions to which they belong motorically. By activating a specific action chain from its very outset, this mechanism allows the observers to have an internal copy of the whole action before its execution, thus enabling them to understand directly the agent's intention. Using electromyographic recordings, we show that a similar chained organization exists in typically developing children, whereas it is impaired in children with autism. We propose that, as a consequence of this functional impairment, high-functioning autistic children may understand the intentions of others cognitively but lack the mechanism for understanding them experientially.mirror neurons ͉ motor chains ͉ motor acts ͉ goal understanding ͉ motor intention H umans and monkeys possess a neural system, called the mirror neuron system, that maps visual descriptions of actions done by others onto the observer's motor representations of the same actions (1). In humans, the mirror neuron system has two major components. One is formed by the inferior parietal lobule and the ventral premotor cortex plus the caudal part of Broca's area, the other by the insula and anterior cingulate gyrus (1, 2).The mirror neuron system does not possess a unique function. Besides its originally proposed role in action understanding, its parieto-frontal component appears to mediate the understanding of intentions of others (3) and imitation (4-7), whereas its insular-cingulate component appears to play a fundamental role in emotion recognition (2,8).Recent data obtained in the monkey revealed that the mirror neuron mechanism underlying intention understanding relies on the activation of a specific set of ''action-constrained'' parietal neurons (9). These neurons discharge in association with specific motor acts but become maximally activated when the coded motor act is embedded into a specific motor action. Thus, for example, action-constrained grasping neurons strongly discharge when grasping a piece of food is followed by bringing it to the mouth, but not when it is followed by placing it into a container. Most interestingly, many action-constrained neurons have mirror properties. These neurons selectively discharge when the observation of motor acts is part of a given action (e.g., grasping for eating but not grasping for placing) (9). Their activation provides, therefore, information on the fact that an individual is grasping, but most importantly also gives clues on why the individual is doing it. Through this mechanism the observer, besides recognizing the observed motor act, is also able to predict what will be the final goal of the action. In other words, the ob...

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“…In fact, front vowels, such as /i/, are intrinsically pronounced with a higher pitch than back vowels, such as /a/ (57, 58). Changes in pitch are salient for newborns (59,60), and so are vowel distinctions (14,61,62), thus both kinds of information could potentially support neonates' recognition of familiar sounds.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Benavides-Varela

Hochmann

Montorsi

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Recent research has shown that specific areas of the human brain are activated by speech from the time of birth. However, it is currently unknown whether newborns' brains also encode and remember the sounds of words when processing speech. The present study investigates the type of information that newborns retain when they hear words and the brain structures that support word-sound recognition. Forty-four healthy newborns were tested with the functional near-infrared spectroscopy method to establish their ability to memorize the sound of a word and distinguish it from a phonetically similar one, 2 min after encoding. Right frontal regions-comparable to those activated in adults during retrieval of verbal materialshowed a characteristic neural signature of recognition when newborns listened to a test word that had the same vowel of a previously heard word. In contrast, a characteristic novelty response was found when a test word had different vowels than the familiar word, despite having the same consonants. These results indicate that the information carried by vowels is better recognized by newborns than the information carried by consonants. Moreover, these data suggest that right frontal areas may support the recognition of speech sequences from the very first stages of language acquisition.neonate's memory | right frontal lobe | sound encoding | speech perception | oxyhemoglobin P revious studies have shown that newborns and human fetuses are able to remember word sounds (1-3) as well as to extract prosodic properties of speech (4) or identity relations between syllables (5, 6). However, neither the specific elements newborns encode from speech, nor the brain structures that mediate speech recognition at birth have been precisely characterized. Building on a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) paradigm used to test memory in newborns (7), the present study asks whether the newborn can remember all of the sounds [consonants (C) and vowels (V)] that form a bisyllabic CVCV word, or whether some of these segments are better encoded than others.Judging by the number of studies reporting early abilities to discriminate fine phonetic contrasts (8), one might be inclined to ascribe to newborns a very detailed representation of the sound of words. In fact, newborns appear to discriminate all phonetic contrasts of the languages of the world, including those that their parents can no longer distinguish. Newborns distinguish consonants differing in one feature-for example, place of articulation, voicing, manner of articulation (9-11), duration (12)-as well as vowel quality contrasts (13,14). Do the representations newborns hold in memory contain the full range of segmental details suggested by these discrimination capacities?Different studies suggest that in adults (15-18), and in infants older than 12 mo (19-23), consonantal sequences are encoded more robustly than vocalic sequences for the representation of words. It is possible that a similar bias (namely, preference for consonantal information when encodi...

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Newborn categorization of vowel‐like sounds

Cited by 48 publications

References 30 publications

Gaze behavior and affect at 6 months: predicting clinical outcomes and language development in typically developing infants and infants at risk for autism

Gaze behavior and affect at 6 months: predicting clinical outcomes and language development in typically developing infants and infants at risk for autism

Impairment of actions chains in autism and its possible role in intention understanding

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

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