Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA ; Haskins Laboratories New Haven, CT, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Apr 17;4:175. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00175. eCollection 2013.
The initial stages of language learning involve a critical interaction between infants' environmental experience and their developing brains. The past several decades of research have produced important behavioral evidence of the many factors influencing this process, both on the part of the child and on the part of the environment that the child is in. The application of neurophysiological techniques to the study of early development has been augmenting these findings at a rapid pace. While the result is an accrual of data bridging the gap between brain and behavior, much work remains to make the link between behavioral evidence of infants' emerging sensitivities and neurophysiological evidence of changes in how their brains process information. Here we review the background behavioral data on how salience and familiarity in the auditory signal shape initial language learning. We follow this with a summary of more recent evidence of changes in infants' brain activity in response to specific aspects of speech. Our goal is to examine language learning through the lens of brain/environment interactions, ultimately focusing on changes in cortical processing of speech across the first year of life. We will ground our examination of recent brain data in the two auditory features initially outlined: salience and familiarity. Our own and others' findings on the influence of these two features reveal that they are key parameters in infants' emerging recognition of structure in the speech signal. Importantly, the evidence we review makes the critical link between behavioral and brain data. We discuss the importance of future work that makes this bridge as a means of moving the study of language development solidly into the domain of brain science.
语言学习的初始阶段涉及婴儿的环境经验和他们正在发育的大脑之间的关键相互作用。过去几十年的研究为影响这一过程的许多因素提供了重要的行为证据，这些因素既存在于儿童身上，也存在于儿童所处的环境中。神经生理学技术在早期发展研究中的应用正在迅速补充这些发现。虽然结果是积累了弥合大脑和行为之间差距的数据，但仍有许多工作要做，以使婴儿新出现的敏感性的行为证据与大脑处理信息方式变化的神经生理学证据之间建立联系。在这里，我们回顾了有关听觉信号中的显着性和熟悉度如何塑造初始语言学习的背景行为数据。之后，我们总结了最近关于婴儿大脑活动对言语特定方面的反应变化的证据。我们的目标是通过大脑/环境相互作用的视角来研究语言学习，最终关注皮质处理言语的变化在生命的第一年。我们将在最初概述的两个听觉特征的基础上，检查最近的大脑数据：显着性和熟悉度。我们自己和其他人关于这两个特征的影响的发现表明，它们是婴儿在言语信号中识别结构的新兴特征的关键参数。重要的是，我们回顾的证据在行为数据和大脑数据之间建立了关键联系。我们讨论了未来工作的重要性，该工作将这座桥梁作为将语言发展研究牢固地纳入脑科学领域的一种手段。
