Dataset Information

Using magnetoencephalography to examine word recognition, lateralization, and future language skills in 14-month-old infants.

ABSTRACT: Word learning is a significant milestone in language acquisition. The second year of life marks a period of dramatic advances in infants' expressive and receptive word-processing abilities. Studies show that in adulthood, language processing is left-hemisphere dominant. However, adults learning a second language activate right-hemisphere brain functions. In infancy, acquisition of a first language involves recruitment of bilateral brain networks, and strong left-hemisphere dominance emerges by the third year. In the current study we focus on 14-month-old infants in the earliest stages of word learning using infant magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imagining to characterize neural activity in response to familiar and unfamiliar words. Specifically, we examine the relationship between right-hemisphere brain responses and prospective measures of vocabulary growth. As expected, MEG source modeling revealed a broadly distributed network in frontal, temporal and parietal cortex that distinguished word classes between 150-900?ms after word onset. Importantly, brain activity in the right frontal cortex in response to familiar words was highly correlated with vocabulary growth at 18, 21, 24, and 27 months. Specifically, higher activation to familiar words in the 150-300?ms interval was associated with faster vocabulary growth, reflecting processing efficiency, whereas higher activation to familiar words in the 600-900?ms interval was associated with slower vocabulary growth, reflecting cognitive effort. These findings inform research and theory on the involvement of right frontal cortex in specific cognitive processes and individual differences related to attention that may play an important role in the development of left-lateralized word processing.

SUBMITTER: Bosseler AN

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7773883 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Using magnetoencephalography to examine word recognition, lateralization, and future language skills in 14-month-old infants.

Bosseler Alexis N AN Clarke Maggie M Tavabi Kambiz K Larson Eric D ED Hippe Daniel S DS Taulu Samu S Kuhl Patricia K PK

Developmental cognitive neuroscience 20201217

Word learning is a significant milestone in language acquisition. The second year of life marks a period of dramatic advances in infants' expressive and receptive word-processing abilities. Studies show that in adulthood, language processing is left-hemisphere dominant. However, adults learning a second language activate right-hemisphere brain functions. In infancy, acquisition of a first language involves recruitment of bilateral brain networks, and strong left-hemisphere dominance emerges by t ...[more]

PMID: 33360832

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Project description:The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm semantic understanding of this word. The current study attempted, first, to replicate, in Norwegian language, the results of recent studies showing that six- to nine-month-old English-learning infants understand the meaning of many common words. Second, it assessed the robustness of a 'comprehension' interpretation by dissociating semantic knowledge from confounded extra-linguistic cues via the manipulation of the contingency between words and objects. Our planned analyses revealed that Norwegian six- to nine-month-old infants did not understand the meaning of the words used in the study. Our exploratory analyses showed evidence of word comprehension at eight to nine months of age-rather than from six to seven months of age for English-learning infants-suggesting that there are cross-linguistic differences in the onset of word comprehension. In addition, our study revealed that eight- to nine-month-old infants cannot rely exclusively on single extra-linguistic cues to disambiguate between two items, thus suggesting the existence of early word-object mappings. However, these mappings are weak, as infants need additional cues (such as an imbalance in frequency of word use) to reveal word recognition. Our results suggest that the very onset of word comprehension is not based on the infants' knowledge of words per se. Rather, infants use a converging set of cues to identify referents, among which frequency is a robust (pre-semantic) cue that infants exploit to guide object disambiguation and, in turn, learn new words.

Dataset Information

Using magnetoencephalography to examine word recognition, lateralization, and future language skills in 14-month-old infants.

Publications

Using magnetoencephalography to examine word recognition, lateralization, and future language skills in 14-month-old infants.

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