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Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain

Sound symbolism, which is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between a word and its meaning, has been suggested to bootstrap language acquisition in infants. However, it is unclear how sound symbolism is processed in the infants’ brain. To address this issue, we investigated the cortical response...

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Autores principales: Yang, Jiale, Asano, Michiko, Kanazawa, So, Yamaguchi, Masami K., Imai, Mutsumi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6748956/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31530863
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49917-0
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author Yang, Jiale
Asano, Michiko
Kanazawa, So
Yamaguchi, Masami K.
Imai, Mutsumi
author_facet Yang, Jiale
Asano, Michiko
Kanazawa, So
Yamaguchi, Masami K.
Imai, Mutsumi
author_sort Yang, Jiale
collection PubMed
description Sound symbolism, which is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between a word and its meaning, has been suggested to bootstrap language acquisition in infants. However, it is unclear how sound symbolism is processed in the infants’ brain. To address this issue, we investigated the cortical response in 11-month-old infants in relation to sound-symbolic correspondences using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Two types of stimuli were presented: a novel visual stimulus (e.g., a round shape) followed by a novel auditory stimulus that either sound-symbolically matched (moma) or mismatched (kipi) the shape. We found a significant hemodynamic increase in the right temporal area, when the sound and the referent sound were symbolically matched, but this effect was limited to the moma stimulus. The anatomical locus corresponds to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), which is thought to process sound symbolism in adults. These findings suggest that prelinguistic infants have the biological basis to detect cross-modal correspondences between word sounds and visual referents.
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spelling pubmed-67489562019-09-27 Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain Yang, Jiale Asano, Michiko Kanazawa, So Yamaguchi, Masami K. Imai, Mutsumi Sci Rep Article Sound symbolism, which is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between a word and its meaning, has been suggested to bootstrap language acquisition in infants. However, it is unclear how sound symbolism is processed in the infants’ brain. To address this issue, we investigated the cortical response in 11-month-old infants in relation to sound-symbolic correspondences using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Two types of stimuli were presented: a novel visual stimulus (e.g., a round shape) followed by a novel auditory stimulus that either sound-symbolically matched (moma) or mismatched (kipi) the shape. We found a significant hemodynamic increase in the right temporal area, when the sound and the referent sound were symbolically matched, but this effect was limited to the moma stimulus. The anatomical locus corresponds to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), which is thought to process sound symbolism in adults. These findings suggest that prelinguistic infants have the biological basis to detect cross-modal correspondences between word sounds and visual referents. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-09-17 /pmc/articles/PMC6748956/ /pubmed/31530863 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49917-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license 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 license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Yang, Jiale
Asano, Michiko
Kanazawa, So
Yamaguchi, Masami K.
Imai, Mutsumi
Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title_full Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title_fullStr Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title_full_unstemmed Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title_short Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
title_sort sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6748956/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31530863
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49917-0
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