Event-related potentials to an english/spanish syllabic contrast in mexican 10-13-month-old infants.

We report brain electrophysiological responses from 10- to 13-month-old Mexican infants while listening to native and foreign CV-syllable contrasts differing in Voice Onset Time (VOT). All infants showed normal auditory event-related potential (ERP) components. Our analyses showed ERP evidence that Mexican infants are capable of discriminating their native sounds as well as the acoustically salient (aspiration) foreign contrast.

Neural substrates of language acquisition.

Infants learn language(s) with apparent ease, and the tools of modern neuroscience are providing valuable information about the mechanisms that underlie this capacity. Noninvasive, safe brain technologies have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. The past decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's processing of language at the phonetic, word, and sentence levels.

Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e).

Infants' speech perception skills show a dual change towards the end of the first year of life. Not only does non-native speech perception decline, as often shown, but native language speech perception skills show improvement, reflecting a facilitative effect of experience with native language. The mechanism underlying change at this point in development, and the relationship between the change in native and non-native speech perception, is of theoretical interest.

Principal component analyses and scalp distribution of the auditory P150-250 and N250-550 to speech contrasts in Mexican and American infants.

We report a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the scalp distribution of the normalized peak amplitude values for speech-related auditory Event-related Potentials (ERP) P150-250 and N250-550 in 7-, 11-, and 20-month-old American infants learning English and in 10-13-month-old Mexican infants learning Spanish. After assessing the infant auditory ERP P-N complex using PCA, we evaluated the topographic distribution of each of the discriminatory phases to native and non-native CV-syllabic contrasts used in Spanish and English. We found that the first two Principal Components for each contrast type across ages showing a maximization of differences between the P150-250 and the N250-550 waves, explain more than 70% of the variance.

An event-related brain potential study of sentence comprehension in preschoolers: semantic and morphosyntactic processing.

The goal of this study was to investigate the distinctiveness and the relative time course of the event-related brain potentials (ERP) elicited by syntactically and semantically anomalous words within sentences in 36- and 48-month-old children. ERPs were recorded while children listened to semantically anomalous (i.e.

Neural patterns to speech and vocabulary growth in American infants.

We report infant auditory event-related potentials to native and foreign contrasts. Foreign contrasts are discriminated at 11 months of age, showing significant differences between the standard and deviant over the positive (P150-250), or over the negative (N250-550) part of the waveform. The amplitudes of these deflections have different amplitude scalp distributions.

Brain potentials to native and non-native speech contrasts in 7- and 11-month-old American infants.

Abstract Behavioral data establish a dramatic change in infants' phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. Foreign-language phonetic discrimination significantly declines with increasing age. Using a longitudinal design, we examined the electrophysiological responses of 7- and 11-month-old American infants to native and non-native consonant contrasts.

N400 during lexical decision tasks: a current source localization study.

Objective: Our primary aim in the present study was to establish the anatomic and psychophysiological correlates of automatic and controlled semantic priming.

Methods: Current sources were calculated on N400 component data from a previous study on lexical decision tasks [Clin Neurophysiol 1999;110:813] using the variable resolution electromagnetic tomography method (VARETA). In this study, two experiments were carried out, one using directly related pairs and the other one using mediated related pairs.

Speech and non-speech processing in hemispherectomised children: an event-related potential study.

Although hemispherectomy is now used as a radical treatment for intractable seizures in a number of centres, there have been limited electrophysiological studies investigating post-procedure auditory-speech processing and recovery or reorganisation. We therefore recorded auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by pure tones and syllables employing a 51-channel electrode array concentrated over the functional hemisphere in 17 patients (nine males, mean age 14.2 years) who had undergone hemispherectomy for intractable seizures; eight of the patients had congenital brain damage and nine had sustained their initial insult at an age of 1 year or older.

Are poor readers semantically challenged? An event-related brain potential assessment.

This study explores visual event-related potentials components in a group of poor readers (PRs) and control children who carried out figure and word categorization tasks. In both tasks, every child had to categorize between animal and non-animal stimuli in an odd-ball GO-GO paradigm. During the word categorization task, PRs presented longer reaction times, a poorer performance, longer and larger P2 amplitudes, and smaller amplitudes and longer P300 latencies than controls.