30 mars 2010
Judit Gervain présentera "The neonate brain detects speech structure: Mechanisms of early language acquisition
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- Intervenant : Judit Gervain
- Laboratoire : Université Paris Descartes
- Date prévue : 30 mars 2010 à 13h00
- Lieu : salle D32, 1er étage, bâtiment BSHM
- Titre : The neonate brain detects speech structure: Mechanisms of early language acquisition
- Abstract : Extract abstract grammatical regularities form speech is necessary for
successful first language acquisition (Chomsky 1959). Infants as young
as 7 months of age are able to accomplish this (Marcus et al. 1999). However, the
abilities of the youngest populations have not been explored. Therefore, a
series of six near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) studies have been
carried out with newborns, investigating their ability to encode simple,
repetition-based regularities and their sequential position. The results
indicate that newborns are able to learn linguistic patterns based on
immediate, but not distant repetitions (ABB, but not ABA; Gervain et al
2008), and that these are encoded in an abstract, rule-like
representation, rich with positional information (e.g. discriminating AAB vs. ABB).
Further, this ability is language-specific, not extending to the same patterns
when those are implemented with piano tones. These neuroimaging results
will be complemented by behavioral data from older infants tracing the
developmental trajectory of the rule learning ability.
