title: Social Interaction in Infants' Learning of Second-Language Phonetics: An Exploration of Brain-Behavior Relations.
abstract: Infants learn phonetic information from a second language with live-person presentations, but not television or audio-only recordings. To understand the role of social interaction in learning a second language, we examined infants' joint attention with live, Spanish-speaking tutors and used a neural measure of phonetic learning. Infants' eye-gaze behaviors during Spanish sessions at 9.5-10.5 months of age predicted second-language phonetic learning, assessed by an event-related potential measure of Spanish phoneme discrimination at 11 months. These data suggest a powerful role for social interaction at the earliest stages of learning a new language.
authors.affiliation: a Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington , Seattle , Washington.
authors.forename: Barbara T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Conboy
authors.forename: Rechele
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Brooks
authors.forename: Andrew N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Meltzoff
authors.forename: Patricia K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Kuhl
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics