Abstract Human infants, unlike even closely related primates, exhibit a remarkable capacity for l... more Abstract Human infants, unlike even closely related primates, exhibit a remarkable capacity for language learning. Yet how the underlying anatomical network matures remains largely unknown. The classical view is that of a largely immature brain comprising only a few islands of maturity in primary cortices. This view has favored a description of learning based on bottom-up algorithms and has tended to discard the role of frontal regions, which were assumed to be barely functional early on.
Studying how the brain develops and becomes functional is important to understand how the man has... more Studying how the brain develops and becomes functional is important to understand how the man has been able to develop specific cognitive abilities, and to comprehend the complexity of some developmental pathologies. Thanks to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), it is now possible to image the baby's immature brain and to consider subtle correlations between the brain anatomical development and the early acquisition of cognitive functions.
Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless f... more Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming1, 2. It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness3–5. Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes.
Abstract Human infants begin to acquire their native language in the first months of life. To det... more Abstract Human infants begin to acquire their native language in the first months of life. To determine which brain regions support language processing at this young age, we measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity evoked by normal and reversed speech in awake and sleeping 3-month-old infants. Left-lateralized brain regions similar to those of adults, including the superior temporal and angular gyri, were already active in infants.
Abstract IN adults, neural networks for phonological processing distinct from those involved in a... more Abstract IN adults, neural networks for phonological processing distinct from those involved in acoustical processing are located in the left temporal lobe. We now report that by the age of 3 months, infants display phonological processing devices analogous to those found in adults. Within a stream of identical syllables, acoustic deviants were introduced, either crossing a phonetic boundary or remaining within the same category. Event-related potentials were recorded using a 64-electrode net.
Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initi... more Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initial specialization of the human brain for speech processing. Our earlier research demonstrated that an adult-like left-lateralized network of perisylvian areas is already active when infants listen to sentences in their native language, but did not address the issue of the specialization of this network for speech processing.
A variant of the non-nutritive sucking method was explored to test 2-month-old infants' perceptio... more A variant of the non-nutritive sucking method was explored to test 2-month-old infants' perception of whole sentences. Three consecutive high-amplitude sucks were required to trigger one sentence, and each subject was submitted to two changes in stimulation, one experimental (language change) and one control (speaker change). The results were significant, showing that the procedure is appropriate for the study of language perception in 2-month-old infants.
Abstract There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech ... more Abstract There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech from an early age. Prosody may be essential to this ability. In this paper, we assess the amount of linguistic information needed by two-month-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. We conducted a cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month old infants, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.
Summary Understanding the development of the human brain is challenging because imaging an immatu... more Summary Understanding the development of the human brain is challenging because imaging an immature brain encounters several difficulties. First, partial volume effects due to the small size of the brain associated with an already complex pattern of gyrification (Fig. 1) hamper cortex edges detection. Second, the GMWM contrast is weak due to unmyelinated white matter.
ABSTRACT When a child hears a new word, he has to figure out what this word refers to. It has bee... more ABSTRACT When a child hears a new word, he has to figure out what this word refers to. It has been argued that the syntactic structures in which new words occur may constrain the possible meanings of a word (a noun generally refers to an object and a verb to an action, but this also applies to classes of verbs)[Gil99]. But can infants use syntax so early on? To answer this question, we presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences to toddlers while we recorded EEG, a paradigm already used by Bernal [BePress].
Abstract Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magne... more Abstract Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain responses to spoken and written language, visual faces, houses, tools, and checkers in adults of variable literacy (10 were illiterate, 22 became literate as adults, and 31 were literate in childhood).
Abstract Humans can understand spoken or written sentences presented at extremely fast rates of∼ ... more Abstract Humans can understand spoken or written sentences presented at extremely fast rates of∼ 400 wpm, far exceeding the normal speech rate (∼ 150 wpm). How does the brain cope with speeded language? And what processing bottlenecks eventually make language incomprehensible above a certain presentation rate?
When a representation is accessed twice, a reduction in the neural activity subserving this repre... more When a representation is accessed twice, a reduction in the neural activity subserving this representation can sometimes be observed (repetition suppression), resulting in a detectable adaptation of the measurable signal in functional MRI [1, 2]. The current experiment examined habituation to auditory sentence repetition, aiming to determine the effect of repetition on the regional hemodynamic response.
We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We stud... more We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast in stop consonants. Moreover, a discrimination response to stop consonants was observed even when syllables were produced by different speakers.
All humans, regardless of their culture and education, possess an intuitive understanding of numb... more All humans, regardless of their culture and education, possess an intuitive understanding of number. Behavioural evidence suggests that numerical competence may be present early on in infancy. Here, we present brain-imaging evidence for distinct cerebral coding of number and object identity in 3-mo-old infants. We compared the visual event-related potentials evoked by unforeseen changes either in the identity of objects forming a set, or in the cardinal of this set.
Speech processing in adults relies on precise and specialized networks, located primarily in the ... more Speech processing in adults relies on precise and specialized networks, located primarily in the left hemisphere. Behavioral studies in infants indicate that a considerable amount of language learning already takes place in the first year of life in the domains of phonology, prosody, and word segmentation. However, little is known about the brain mechanisms underlying these abilities. Progress in brain-imaging techniques now allows us to address this question.
Investigating the degree of similarity between infants' and adults' representation of speech is c... more Investigating the degree of similarity between infants' and adults' representation of speech is critical to our understanding of infants' ability to acquire language. Phoneme perception plays a crucial role in language processing, and numerous behavioral studies have demonstrated similar capacities in infants and adults, but are these subserved by the same neural substrates or networks?
In order to learn an oral language, humans have to discover words from a continuous signal. Strea... more In order to learn an oral language, humans have to discover words from a continuous signal. Streams of artificial monotonous speech can be readily segmented based on the statistical analysis of the syllables' distribution. This parsing is considerably improved when acoustic cues, such as subliminal pauses, are added suggesting that a different mechanism is involved. Here we used a frequency-tagging approach to explore the neural mechanisms underlying word learning while listening to continuous speech.
Children's cognitive abilities and school achievements are deeply affected by parental socioecono... more Children's cognitive abilities and school achievements are deeply affected by parental socioeconomic status (SES). Numerous studies have reported lower cognitive performance in relation to unfavorable environments, but little is known about the effects of SES on the child's neural structures. Here, we systematically explore the association between SES and brain anatomy through MRI in a group of 23 healthy 10-year-old children with a wide range of parental SES.
In order to understand how genetic mutations might have favored language development in our speci... more In order to understand how genetic mutations might have favored language development in our species, we need a better description of the human brain at the beginning of life. As the linguistic network mainly involves the left perisylvian regions in adults, we used anatomical MRI to study the structural asymmetries of these regions in 14 preverbal infants. Our results show four significant asymmetries.
Abstract Human infants, unlike even closely related primates, exhibit a remarkable capacity for l... more Abstract Human infants, unlike even closely related primates, exhibit a remarkable capacity for language learning. Yet how the underlying anatomical network matures remains largely unknown. The classical view is that of a largely immature brain comprising only a few islands of maturity in primary cortices. This view has favored a description of learning based on bottom-up algorithms and has tended to discard the role of frontal regions, which were assumed to be barely functional early on.
Studying how the brain develops and becomes functional is important to understand how the man has... more Studying how the brain develops and becomes functional is important to understand how the man has been able to develop specific cognitive abilities, and to comprehend the complexity of some developmental pathologies. Thanks to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), it is now possible to image the baby's immature brain and to consider subtle correlations between the brain anatomical development and the early acquisition of cognitive functions.
Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless f... more Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming1, 2. It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness3–5. Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes.
Abstract Human infants begin to acquire their native language in the first months of life. To det... more Abstract Human infants begin to acquire their native language in the first months of life. To determine which brain regions support language processing at this young age, we measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity evoked by normal and reversed speech in awake and sleeping 3-month-old infants. Left-lateralized brain regions similar to those of adults, including the superior temporal and angular gyri, were already active in infants.
Abstract IN adults, neural networks for phonological processing distinct from those involved in a... more Abstract IN adults, neural networks for phonological processing distinct from those involved in acoustical processing are located in the left temporal lobe. We now report that by the age of 3 months, infants display phonological processing devices analogous to those found in adults. Within a stream of identical syllables, acoustic deviants were introduced, either crossing a phonetic boundary or remaining within the same category. Event-related potentials were recorded using a 64-electrode net.
Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initi... more Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initial specialization of the human brain for speech processing. Our earlier research demonstrated that an adult-like left-lateralized network of perisylvian areas is already active when infants listen to sentences in their native language, but did not address the issue of the specialization of this network for speech processing.
A variant of the non-nutritive sucking method was explored to test 2-month-old infants' perceptio... more A variant of the non-nutritive sucking method was explored to test 2-month-old infants' perception of whole sentences. Three consecutive high-amplitude sucks were required to trigger one sentence, and each subject was submitted to two changes in stimulation, one experimental (language change) and one control (speaker change). The results were significant, showing that the procedure is appropriate for the study of language perception in 2-month-old infants.
Abstract There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech ... more Abstract There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech from an early age. Prosody may be essential to this ability. In this paper, we assess the amount of linguistic information needed by two-month-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. We conducted a cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month old infants, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.
Summary Understanding the development of the human brain is challenging because imaging an immatu... more Summary Understanding the development of the human brain is challenging because imaging an immature brain encounters several difficulties. First, partial volume effects due to the small size of the brain associated with an already complex pattern of gyrification (Fig. 1) hamper cortex edges detection. Second, the GMWM contrast is weak due to unmyelinated white matter.
ABSTRACT When a child hears a new word, he has to figure out what this word refers to. It has bee... more ABSTRACT When a child hears a new word, he has to figure out what this word refers to. It has been argued that the syntactic structures in which new words occur may constrain the possible meanings of a word (a noun generally refers to an object and a verb to an action, but this also applies to classes of verbs)[Gil99]. But can infants use syntax so early on? To answer this question, we presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences to toddlers while we recorded EEG, a paradigm already used by Bernal [BePress].
Abstract Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magne... more Abstract Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain responses to spoken and written language, visual faces, houses, tools, and checkers in adults of variable literacy (10 were illiterate, 22 became literate as adults, and 31 were literate in childhood).
Abstract Humans can understand spoken or written sentences presented at extremely fast rates of∼ ... more Abstract Humans can understand spoken or written sentences presented at extremely fast rates of∼ 400 wpm, far exceeding the normal speech rate (∼ 150 wpm). How does the brain cope with speeded language? And what processing bottlenecks eventually make language incomprehensible above a certain presentation rate?
When a representation is accessed twice, a reduction in the neural activity subserving this repre... more When a representation is accessed twice, a reduction in the neural activity subserving this representation can sometimes be observed (repetition suppression), resulting in a detectable adaptation of the measurable signal in functional MRI [1, 2]. The current experiment examined habituation to auditory sentence repetition, aiming to determine the effect of repetition on the regional hemodynamic response.
We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We stud... more We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast in stop consonants. Moreover, a discrimination response to stop consonants was observed even when syllables were produced by different speakers.
All humans, regardless of their culture and education, possess an intuitive understanding of numb... more All humans, regardless of their culture and education, possess an intuitive understanding of number. Behavioural evidence suggests that numerical competence may be present early on in infancy. Here, we present brain-imaging evidence for distinct cerebral coding of number and object identity in 3-mo-old infants. We compared the visual event-related potentials evoked by unforeseen changes either in the identity of objects forming a set, or in the cardinal of this set.
Speech processing in adults relies on precise and specialized networks, located primarily in the ... more Speech processing in adults relies on precise and specialized networks, located primarily in the left hemisphere. Behavioral studies in infants indicate that a considerable amount of language learning already takes place in the first year of life in the domains of phonology, prosody, and word segmentation. However, little is known about the brain mechanisms underlying these abilities. Progress in brain-imaging techniques now allows us to address this question.
Investigating the degree of similarity between infants' and adults' representation of speech is c... more Investigating the degree of similarity between infants' and adults' representation of speech is critical to our understanding of infants' ability to acquire language. Phoneme perception plays a crucial role in language processing, and numerous behavioral studies have demonstrated similar capacities in infants and adults, but are these subserved by the same neural substrates or networks?
In order to learn an oral language, humans have to discover words from a continuous signal. Strea... more In order to learn an oral language, humans have to discover words from a continuous signal. Streams of artificial monotonous speech can be readily segmented based on the statistical analysis of the syllables' distribution. This parsing is considerably improved when acoustic cues, such as subliminal pauses, are added suggesting that a different mechanism is involved. Here we used a frequency-tagging approach to explore the neural mechanisms underlying word learning while listening to continuous speech.
Children's cognitive abilities and school achievements are deeply affected by parental socioecono... more Children's cognitive abilities and school achievements are deeply affected by parental socioeconomic status (SES). Numerous studies have reported lower cognitive performance in relation to unfavorable environments, but little is known about the effects of SES on the child's neural structures. Here, we systematically explore the association between SES and brain anatomy through MRI in a group of 23 healthy 10-year-old children with a wide range of parental SES.
In order to understand how genetic mutations might have favored language development in our speci... more In order to understand how genetic mutations might have favored language development in our species, we need a better description of the human brain at the beginning of life. As the linguistic network mainly involves the left perisylvian regions in adults, we used anatomical MRI to study the structural asymmetries of these regions in 14 preverbal infants. Our results show four significant asymmetries.
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