13
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Infant-directed speech facilitates seven-month-old infants’ cortical tracking of speech

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          This study assessed cortical tracking of temporal information in incoming natural speech in seven-month-old infants. Cortical tracking refers to the process by which neural activity follows the dynamic patterns of the speech input. In adults, it has been shown to involve attentional mechanisms and to facilitate effective speech encoding. However, in infants, cortical tracking or its effects on speech processing have not been investigated. This study measured cortical tracking of speech in infants and, given the involvement of attentional mechanisms in this process, cortical tracking of both infant-directed speech (IDS), which is highly attractive to infants, and the less captivating adult-directed speech (ADS), were compared. IDS is the speech register parents use when addressing young infants. In comparison to ADS, it is characterised by several acoustic qualities that capture infants’ attention to linguistic input and assist language learning. Seven-month-old infants’ cortical responses were recorded via electroencephalography as they listened to IDS or ADS recordings. Results showed stronger low-frequency cortical tracking of the speech envelope in IDS than in ADS. This suggests that IDS has a privileged status in facilitating successful cortical tracking of incoming speech which may, in turn, augment infants’ early speech processing and even later language development.

          Related collections

          Most cited references36

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Phase-Locked Responses to Speech in Human Auditory Cortex are Enhanced During Comprehension

          A growing body of evidence shows that ongoing oscillations in auditory cortex modulate their phase to match the rhythm of temporally regular acoustic stimuli, increasing sensitivity to relevant environmental cues and improving detection accuracy. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that nonsensory information provided by linguistic content enhances phase-locked responses to intelligible speech in the human brain. Sixteen adults listened to meaningful sentences while we recorded neural activity using magnetoencephalography. Stimuli were processed using a noise-vocoding technique to vary intelligibility while keeping the temporal acoustic envelope consistent. We show that the acoustic envelopes of sentences contain most power between 4 and 7 Hz and that it is in this frequency band that phase locking between neural activity and envelopes is strongest. Bilateral oscillatory neural activity phase-locked to unintelligible speech, but this cerebro-acoustic phase locking was enhanced when speech was intelligible. This enhanced phase locking was left lateralized and localized to left temporal cortex. Together, our results demonstrate that entrainment to connected speech does not only depend on acoustic characteristics, but is also affected by listeners’ ability to extract linguistic information. This suggests a biological framework for speech comprehension in which acoustic and linguistic cues reciprocally aid in stimulus prediction.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: found
            Is Open Access

            The Multivariate Temporal Response Function (mTRF) Toolbox: A MATLAB Toolbox for Relating Neural Signals to Continuous Stimuli

            Understanding how brains process sensory signals in natural environments is one of the key goals of twenty-first century neuroscience. While brain imaging and invasive electrophysiology will play key roles in this endeavor, there is also an important role to be played by noninvasive, macroscopic techniques with high temporal resolution such as electro- and magnetoencephalography. But challenges exist in determining how best to analyze such complex, time-varying neural responses to complex, time-varying and multivariate natural sensory stimuli. There has been a long history of applying system identification techniques to relate the firing activity of neurons to complex sensory stimuli and such techniques are now seeing increased application to EEG and MEG data. One particular example involves fitting a filter—often referred to as a temporal response function—that describes a mapping between some feature(s) of a sensory stimulus and the neural response. Here, we first briefly review the history of these system identification approaches and describe a specific technique for deriving temporal response functions known as regularized linear regression. We then introduce a new open-source toolbox for performing this analysis. We describe how it can be used to derive (multivariate) temporal response functions describing a mapping between stimulus and response in both directions. We also explain the importance of regularizing the analysis and how this regularization can be optimized for a particular dataset. We then outline specifically how the toolbox implements these analyses and provide several examples of the types of results that the toolbox can produce. Finally, we consider some of the limitations of the toolbox and opportunities for future development and application.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Preference for infant-directed speech in the first month after birth.

              2 experiments examined behavioral preferences for infant-directed (ID) speech over adult-directed (AD) speech in young infants. Using a modification of the visual-fixation-based auditory-preference procedure, Experiments 1 and 2 examined whether 12 1-month-old and 16 2-day-old infants looked longer at a visual stimulus when looking produced ID as opposed to AD speech. The results showed that both 1-month-olds and newborns preferred ID over AD speech. Although the absolute magnitude of the ID speech preference was significantly greater, with the older infants showing longer looking durations than the younger infants, subsequent analyses showed no significant difference in the relative magnitude of this effect. Differences in overall looking times between the 2 groups apparently reflect task variables rather than differences in speech processing. These results suggest that infants' preference for the exaggerated prosodic features of ID speech is present from birth and may not depend on any specific postnatal experience. However, the possible role of prenatal auditory experience with speech is considered.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                m.kalashnikova@westernsydney.edu.au
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                13 September 2018
                13 September 2018
                2018
                : 8
                : 13745
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9939 5719, GRID grid.1029.a, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, , Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1797, ; Penrith, 2527 Australia
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9705, GRID grid.8217.c, School of Engineering, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, , and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, ; Dublin, Ireland
                [3 ]ISNI 0000000121105547, GRID grid.5607.4, Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, , Ecole Normale Supérieure, ; Paris, 75005 France
                [4 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9174, GRID grid.16416.34, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Neuroscience, , University of Rochester, Rochester, ; New York, 14627 USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7924-8687
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7361-0980
                Article
                32150
                10.1038/s41598-018-32150-6
                6137049
                30214000
                262bb589-2115-4551-8970-4adc0a22dd30
                © The Author(s) 2018

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 27 April 2018
                : 6 August 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000923, Australian Research Council (ARC);
                Award ID: DP110105123
                Award ID: DP110105123
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2018

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article