Longitudinal trajectories of the neural encoding mechanisms of speech-sound features during the first year of life

Publication date
2024-09-25
Document type
Research article
Author
Puertollano, Marta
Ribas-Prats, Teresa
Gorina-Careta, Natàlia
Ijjou-Kadiri, Siham
Mondéjar-Segovia, Alejandro
Gómez-Roig, María Dolores
Escera, Carles
Organisational unit
Brainlab – Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Spain
Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Spain
Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD), Barcelona, Spain
BCNatal – Barcelona Center for Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine (Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and Hospital Clínic), University of Barcelona, Spain
DOI
URI
Publisher
Elsevier
Series or journal
Brain and Language
ISSN
Periodical volume
258
Periodical issue
11
Article ID
105474
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
Nein
Language
English
Keyword
early language acquisition
speech encoding
infant
newborn
Frequency-following response
auditory evoked potential
Abstract
Infants quickly recognize the sounds of their mother language, perceiving the spectrotemporal acoustic features of speech. However, the underlying neural machinery remains unclear. We used an auditory evoked potential termed frequency-following response (FFR) to unravel the neural encoding maturation for two speech sound characteristics: voice pitch and temporal fine structure. 37 healthy-term neonates were tested at birth and retested at the ages of six and twelve months. Results revealed a reduction in neural phase-locking onset to the stimulus envelope from birth to six months, stabilizing by twelve months. While neural encoding of voice pitch remained consistent across ages, temporal fine structure encoding matured rapidly from birth to six months, without further improvement from six to twelve months. Results highlight the critical importance of the first six months of life in the maturation of neural encoding mechanisms that are crucial for phoneme discrimination during early language acquisition.
Description
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
Version
Published version
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