Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

The power and precision with which humans link language to cognition is unique to our species. By 3-4 months of age, infants have already established this link: simply listening to human language facilitates infants' success in fundamental cognitive processes. Initially, this link to cognition is also engaged by a broader set of acoustic stimuli,…

Infants born after fetal growth restriction (FGR)--an obstetric condition defined as the failure to achieve the genetic growth potential--are prone to neurodevelopmental delays, with language being one of the major affected areas. Yet, while verbal comprehension and expressive language impairments have been observed in FGR infants, children and…

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8 weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy…

There is some evidence for sex differences in habituation in the human fetus, but it is unknown whether this is due to differences in central processing (habituation) or in more peripheral processes, sensory or motor, involved in the response. This study examined whether the sex of the fetus influenced auditory habituation at 33 weeks of…

We examined whether 12-month-old infants privilege words over other linguistic stimuli in an associative learning task. Sixty-four infants were presented with sets of either word-object, communicative sound-object, or consonantal sound-object pairings until they habituated. They were then tested on a "switch" in the sound to determine whether they…

According to the rapid auditory processing theory, the ability to parse incoming auditory information underpins learning of oral and written language. There is wide variation in this low-level perceptual ability, which appears to follow a protracted developmental course. We studied the development of rapid auditory processing using event-related…

Early post-natal nutrition influences later development, but there are no studies comparing brain function in healthy infants as a function of dietary intake even though the major infant diets differ significantly in nutrient composition. We studied brain responses (event-related potentials; ERPs) to speech sounds for infants who were fed either…

The perception of speech and music requires processing of variations in spectra and amplitude over different time intervals. Near-term fetuses can discriminate acoustic features, such as frequencies and spectra, but whether they can process complex auditory streams, such as speech sequences and more specifically their temporal variations, fast or…

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has…

This study tested if children with specific language impairment (SLI) or children with specific reading disability (SRD) have abnormal brain responses to sounds. We tested 6- to 12-year-old children with SLI (N = 19), children with SRD (N = 55), and age-matched controls (N = 36) for their passive auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to tones,…

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development ( Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically,…

Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low-level perceptual information, or a featural/surface-biased information-processing style, may compromise higher-level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low-level/perceptual and high-level/semantic information, tested…

Under many conditions auditory input interferes with visual processing, especially early in development. These interference effects are often more pronounced when the auditory input is unfamiliar than when the auditory input is familiar (e.g. human speech, pre-familiarized sounds, etc.). The current study extends this research by examining how…

Autism is a disorder characterized by a core impairment in social behaviour. A prominent component of this social deficit is poor orienting to speech. It is unclear whether this deficit involves an impairment in allocating attention to speech sounds, or a sensory impairment in processing phonetic information. In this study, event-related…