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Developmental trajectory of cortical tracking of native and non-native speech stimuli in monolingual and bilingual infants
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Poster C92 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Giulia Mornati1, Nicola Molinaro1,2, Marie Lallier1, Manuel Carreiras1,2,3, Marina Kalashnikova1,2; 1BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 2Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain, 3University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain
Infants rely on prosodic information to differentiate the language or languages present in their environment from other unfamiliar languages and to start segmenting native speech. This study investigates cortical tracking of speech - a neural mechanism potentially underlying this early ability. Cortical tracking refers to the synchronization between neural oscillations and the temporal structure of the speech envelope. We are specifically interested in cortical tracking of low-frequency prosodic information (at the delta, <3 Hz, and the theta, 4-8 Hz, bands). These frequency bands have been related to different levels of speech processing: delta corresponds to processing of rhythm and prosody at the phrasal and word levels, while theta has been related to finer-grain linguistic analysis, involving processing of syllable-level information in speech. Hence, we predict that infants will show efficient cortical tracking of speech at the delta band in the first months of life, reflecting early sensitivity to the rhythmic and prosodic structure of native and non-native speech. On the other hand, we expect cortical tracking at the theta band to increase throughout infants’ first year of life, particularly in response to native speech, as infants accumulate greater language exposure and develop the ability to encode fine-grain prosodic and phonetic detail in their native language(s). We are conducting a large-scale longitudinal study that assesses language development from 4 months to 7 years of age in 180 infants acquiring Spanish and/or Basque in a bilingual community. Here, we will report preliminary results (40 infants) for 4- and 7-month-assessments of infants’ cortical tracking of speech. In this task, infants are presented with three prerecorded stories in Spanish and Basque (both syllable-timed languages familiar to infants) and English (unfamiliar stress-timed language), while their neural activity is recorded using continuous electroencephalography (EEG). For each participant, information about the level of exposure to each language is collected using a parental questionnaire. We will calculate coherence between the neural oscillatory activity and the speech envelope. The specific frequency ranges for each band will be determined by the rates at which stressed (delta band) and unstressed syllables (theta band) occur in the stimuli from each language (Spanish, Basque, and English). At 4 months, we expect that infants will show cortical tracking of speech in response to all three languages, demonstrating language-general sensitivity to prosodic information in the speech signal. It is possible that higher coherence will be observed for the two familiar syllable-timed languages (Spanish ad Basque) than the unfamiliar stress-timed language (English) as evidence for infants’ growing familiarity with the prosodic patterns of the language(s) present in their environment. At 7 months, however, we expect an increase in theta, but not delta coherence, specifically for the language that infants encounter more often in their environment (familiar dominant language), followed by the familiar but non-dominant language, and followed by the unfamiliar non-native language. This results pattern will evidence the complex relation between the effects of neural maturation and accumulating language-specific experience on infants’ developing ability to encode linguistic information from the auditory speech signal.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Multilingualism