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The developmental origins of neural oscillations and their role in language development| old_uid | 19712 |
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| title | The developmental origins of neural oscillations and their role in language development |
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| start_date | 2021/11/22 |
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| schedule | 12h15 |
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| online | no |
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| details | Invitée par Julie Franck |
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| summary | Speech is quasi-rhythmic as it possesses a temporal structure that exhibits high regularity. Some of this regularity is observed in the modulations of the speech envelope. We found that across typologically different languages, the strongest modulation occurs between 2 and 10 Hz, with a peak around 5 Hz, which corresponds to the syllabic rate (Varnet et al., 2017). Additionally, we also found that slight differences in the AMi spectra reflect linguistic properties such as word order and rhythmic class: the maximum modulation index at the peak is significantly lower for Complement-Head languages than in Head-Complement languages, while the exact frequency of this maximum differed between stress-timed (English, Dutch) and syllable-timed languages (French, Spanish). In adults, such amplitude modulations of the speech signal are readily tracked by the auditory cortex (Ahissar et al., 2001; Luo and Poeppel, 2007) and this speech envelope tracking has been claimed to play a causal role in speech comprehension. I will present an EEG study with nebworns to show that it already takes place at birth and is not modulated by language familiarity (prenatal experience), therefore, suggesting that it represents a basic auditory ability, occurring in the absence of attention and comprehension (Ortiz Barajas et al., 2021a). These results are supported by our findings in cross-frequency coupling (nesting) at birth, were we found that the phase of lower-frequency oscillations (1-2 Hz) modulates the amplitude of higher-frequency oscillations (3-20 Hz) in familiar and unfamiliar languages alike (Ortiz Barajas et al., 2021b). These, together with our results for 6 months-olds, suggest that brain synchronization to the speech envelope modulations is universal at birth, and changes with development and speech experience. The implications of these early speech tracking abilities for language development will be discussed. |
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| oncancel | Cplt - |
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| responsibles | Atanasova |
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