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SUMMARY:How Infants Learn Language Using Speech Rhythm and Neuronal Oscill
 ations - Dr Victoria Leong\, University of Cambridge 
DTSTART:20160209T170000Z
DTEND:20160209T183000Z
UID:TALK63258@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gabriela Pavarini
DESCRIPTION:Young children spontaneously develop awareness of "big" phonol
 ogical (speech sound) units such as prosodic stress patterns\, syllables a
 nd rhymes. By 7.5 months\, infants can use prosodic rhythm (motifs of stro
 ng and weak syllables) to segment words from continuous speech. This is a 
 complex feat of speech engineering\, requiring the child to "hack" the aco
 ustic signal for its implicit phonological structure. In this talk\, I wil
 l present converging computational and experimental evidence which suggest
 s that infants could perform this feat through speech-to-brain coupling. T
 his a process by which endogenous neuronal oscillations in the cortex entr
 ain to a temporally-matched hierarchy of rhythmic patterns in the speech s
 ignal. Nursery rhymes and other forms of infant-directed speech have an en
 hanced and exaggerated rhythmic architecture which provides a rich substra
 te for acoustic-phonological extraction by the infant brain. Finally\, I w
 ill provide preliminary evidence that brain-to-brain coupling between adul
 ts and infants could provide an early neural mechanism for the development
  of joint attention\, which plays a important social modulatory role in ea
 rly language learning. \n
LOCATION:Lecture Room 1\, Faculty of Music\, 11 West Road\, CB3 9DP
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