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Tracking Transitional Probabilities and Segmenting Auditory Sequences Are Dissociable Processes in Adults and Neonates

Authors :
Benjamin, Lucas
Fló, Ana
Palu, Marie
Naik, Shruti
Melloni, Lucia
Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine
Source :
Developmental Science. Mar 2023 26(2).
Publication Year :
2023

Abstract

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit to four syllables, and its automaticity by testing asleep neonates. Using markers of statistical learning in neonates' EEG, compared to adult behavioral performances in the same task, we confirmed that statistical learning is automatic enough to be efficient even in sleeping neonates. We also revealed that: (1) Successfully tracking transition probabilities (TP) in a sequence is not sufficient to segment it. (2) Prosodic cues, as subtle as subliminal pauses, enable to recover words segmenting capacities. (3) Adults' and neonates' capacities to segment streams seem remarkably similar despite the difference of maturation and expertise. Finally, we observed that learning increased the overall similarity of neural responses across infants during exposure to the stream, providing a novel neural marker to monitor learning. Thus, from birth, infants are equipped with adult-like tools, allowing them to extract small coherent word-like units from auditory streams, based on the combination of statistical analyses and auditory parsing cues.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1363-755X and 1467-7687
Volume :
26
Issue :
2
Database :
ERIC
Journal :
Developmental Science
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
EJ1369736
Document Type :
Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13300