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GervainAbstractJudit Gervain: "The neonate brain detects speech structure: Mechanisms of early language acquisition" 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. |