Examinando por Autor "Gervain, Judit"

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    Do babies perceive cries as speech?
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2026) Lucarini, Gaia; Cruz-Pavía, Irene de la; Gemignani, Jessica; Nallet, Caroline; Lapillonne Alexandre; Gervain, Judit
    Speech perception and production are linked in adults. Since infants show sophisticated speech perception abilities before they produce language, the link has been assumed to emerge with development. However, crying is a communication signal that infants produce from birth and their cry melodies are modulated by prenatally heard speech. Cries and speech may thus be developmentally continuous, and the production-perception link may be most evident early in life for cries. We therefore examined whether newborns perceive cries similarly to speech. French neonates exposed to French cries and French speech showed greater neural responses to cries than to speech in the right temporal region. By contrast, Italian adults unfamiliar with French responded more strongly to speech than to cries. Newborns’ heightened response to a communicative signal that is less familiar and acoustically less complex, but one they can produce suggests that vocal production and auditory perception may be linked from birth.
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    Six-month-old infants' perception of structural regularities in speech
    (Elsevier B.V., 2023-09) Cruz-Pavía, Irene de la ; Gervain, Judit
    In order to acquire grammar, infants need to extract regularities from the linguistic input. From birth, infants can detect regularities in speech based on identity relations, and show strong neural activation to syllable sequences containing adjacent repetitions of identical syllables (e.g. ABB: mubaba). Meanwhile, newborns' neural responses to sequences of different syllables (e.g. ABC: mubage, i.e. diversity-based relations) do not differ from baseline. However, this latter ability needs to emerge during development, as most linguistic units, such as words, are composed of highly variable sequences. As infants begin to learn their first word forms at 6 months, we hypothesize that the ability to represent sequences of different syllables might become important for them at this age. Using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), we measured 6-month-old infants' brain responses to repetition- and diversity-based sequences in the bilateral temporal, parietal and frontal areas. We found that 6-month-olds discriminated the repetition- and diversity-based structures in frontal and parietal regions, and exhibited equally strong activation to both grammars as compared to baseline. These results show that by 6 months of age, infants encode sequences with diversity-based structures. They thus provide the earliest evidence that prelexical infants represent difference in speech stimuli, which behavioral studies first attest at 11 months of age.