ArticleFrontiers in psychology2013
Theta brain rhythms index perceptual narrowing in infant speech perception.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Magnetoencephalography and the infant brain.NeuroImage · 2019Pooled it
- Linguistic effect on speech perception observed at the brainstem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Trial
- Revolutionizing Pediatric Neurophysiology With Magnetoencephalography.Psychophysiology · 2026Review
- Article
- A Complex Acoustical Environment During Development Enhances Auditory Perception and Coding Efficiency in the Zebra Finch.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- A complex acoustical environment during development enhances auditory perception and coding efficiency in the zebra finch.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Monitoring pilot trainees' cognitive control under a simulator-based training process with EEG microstate analysis.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Paediatric magnetoencephalography and its role in neurodevelopmental disorders.The British journal of radiology · 2024Review
- Functional and structural maturation of auditory cortex from 2 months to 2 years old.Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2024Article
- From Infancy to Childhood: A Comprehensive Review of Event- and Task-Related Brain Oscillations.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Mother-infant social and language interactions at 3 months are associated with infants' productive language development in the third year of life.Infant behavior & development · 2024Article
- Infants' brain responses to social interaction predict future language growth.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Neural oscillations and speech processing at birth.iScience · 2023Article
- Phonological acquisition depends on the timing of speech sounds: Deconvolution EEG modeling across the first five years.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Experience-dependent effects of passive auditory exposure in infants impact theta phase synchrony and predict later language.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- The emergence of idiosyncratic patterns in the frequency-following response during the first year of life.JASA express letters · 2022Article
- Modulation of Theta Phase Synchrony during Syllable Processing as a Function of Interactive Acoustic Experience in Infancy.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Reduced Theta Sampling in Infants at Risk for Dyslexia across the Sensitive Period of Native Phoneme Learning.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Developmental changes in auditory-evoked neural activity underlie infants' links between language and cognition.Developmental science · 2021Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The development of speech perception shows a dramatic transition between infancy and adulthood. Between 6 and 12 months, infants' initial ability to discriminate all phonetic units across the world's languages narrows-native discrimination increases while non-native discrimination shows a steep decline. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine whether brain oscillations in the theta band (4-8 Hz), reflecting increases in attention and cognitive effort, would provide a neural measure of the perceptual narrowing phenomenon in speech. Using an oddball paradigm, we varied speech stimuli in two dimensions, stimulus frequency (frequent vs. infrequent) and language (native vs. non-native speech syllables) and tested 6-month-old infants, 12-month-old infants, and adults. We hypothesized that 6-month-old infants would show increased relative theta power (RTP) for frequent syllables, regardless of their status as native or non-native syllables, reflecting young infants' attention and cognitive effort in response to highly frequent stimuli ("statistical learning"). In adults, we hypothesized increased RTP for non-native stimuli, regardless of their presentation frequency, reflecting increased cognitive effort for non-native phonetic categories. The 12-month-old infants were expected to show a pattern in transition, but one more similar to adults than to 6-month-old infants. The MEG brain rhythm results supported these hypotheses. We suggest that perceptual narrowing in speech perception is governed by an implicit learning process. This learning process involves an implicit shift in attention from frequent events (infants) to learned categories (adults). Theta brain oscillatory activity may provide an index of perceptual narrowing beyond speech, and would offer a test of whether the early speech learning process is governed by domain-general or domain-specific processes.
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