title: Electrophysiological evidence of statistical learning of long-distance dependencies in 8-month-old preterm and full-term infants.
abstract: Using electroencephalography, we examined 8-month-old infants' ability to discover a systematic dependency between the first and third syllables of successive words, concatenated into a monotonous speech stream, and to subsequently generalize this regularity to new items presented in isolation. Full-term and preterm infants, while exposed to the stream, displayed a significant entrainment (phase-locking) to the syllabic and word frequencies, demonstrating that they were sensitive to the word unit. The acquisition of the systematic dependency defining words was confirmed by the significantly different neural responses to rule-words and part-words subsequently presented during the test phase. Finally, we observed a correlation between syllabic entrainment during learning and the difference in phase coherence between the test conditions (rule-words vs part-words) suggesting that temporal processing of the syllable unit might be crucial in linguistic learning. No group difference was observed suggesting that non-adjacent statistical computations are already robust at 8 months, even in preterm infants, and thus develop during the first year of life, earlier than expected from behavioral studies.
authors: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris 11, F-91191 Orsay, France. Electronic address: claire.kabdebon@gmail.com.
authors: C
authors: C
authors: Kabdebon
authors: Escuela de Psicología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile.
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Pena
authors: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris 11, F-91191 Orsay, France.
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Buiatti
authors: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris 11, F-91191 Orsay, France.
authors: G
authors: G
authors: Dehaene-Lambertz
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007234:Infant, Premature / Q000502:physiology*; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Event-related potentials; Frequency tagging; Infant; Language; Learning; Phase-locking; Prematurity; Statistics