title: Auditory evoked responses recorded from 16-month-old human infants to words they did and did not know.
abstract: Auditory evoked responses (AERs) were recorded from the frontal, temporal, and parietal scalp regions of nine male and nine female 16-month-old infants while they listened to a series of words. The brain responses reliably discriminated between words the infants were thought to understand versus those that they did not appear to know as judged by their parents and two independent raters. Findings from this study indicated that the brain wave patterns could discriminate known from unknown words. Sex differences in the patterns of lateralized hemispheric responses to the known and unknown words were also noted. These data indicate that auditory evoked responses may be used to detect differences in word meanings in young infants.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 62901.
authors.forename: D L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Molfese
mesh_terms: D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary