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Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life

Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural u...

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Autores principales: Di Liberto, Giovanni M., Attaheri, Adam, Cantisani, Giorgia, Reilly, Richard B., Ní Choisdealbha, Áine, Rocha, Sinead, Brusini, Perrine, Goswami, Usha
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10692113/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38040720
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43490-x
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author Di Liberto, Giovanni M.
Attaheri, Adam
Cantisani, Giorgia
Reilly, Richard B.
Ní Choisdealbha, Áine
Rocha, Sinead
Brusini, Perrine
Goswami, Usha
author_facet Di Liberto, Giovanni M.
Attaheri, Adam
Cantisani, Giorgia
Reilly, Richard B.
Ní Choisdealbha, Áine
Rocha, Sinead
Brusini, Perrine
Goswami, Usha
author_sort Di Liberto, Giovanni M.
collection PubMed
description Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram.
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spelling pubmed-106921132023-12-03 Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life Di Liberto, Giovanni M. Attaheri, Adam Cantisani, Giorgia Reilly, Richard B. Ní Choisdealbha, Áine Rocha, Sinead Brusini, Perrine Goswami, Usha Nat Commun Article Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC10692113/ /pubmed/38040720 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43490-x Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Di Liberto, Giovanni M.
Attaheri, Adam
Cantisani, Giorgia
Reilly, Richard B.
Ní Choisdealbha, Áine
Rocha, Sinead
Brusini, Perrine
Goswami, Usha
Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title_full Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title_fullStr Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title_full_unstemmed Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title_short Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
title_sort emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10692113/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38040720
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43490-x
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