Cognate beginnings to bilingual lexical acquisition.

Recent studies suggest that cognateness boosts bilingual lexical acquisition. This study proposes an account in which language co-activation accelerates accumulation of word-learning instances across languages. This account predicts a larger cognate facilitation for words in the lower-exposure language than in the higher-exposure language, as the former receive co-activation from their translations more frequently.

Learning phonetic categories in infancy: The role of word-context information.

Identifying the type of mechanisms at the core of phonetic categorization remains a central subject of research in infant language learning. Amongst different theories, one is that infants compute distributional information of phonemes based on their surrounding sounds (i.e.

Monolingual and bilingual infants' attention to talking faces: evidence from eye-tracking and Bayesian modeling.

Introduction: A substantial amount of research from the last two decades suggests that infants' attention to the eyes and mouth regions of talking faces could be a supporting mechanism by which they acquire their native(s) language(s). Importantly, attentional strategies seem to be sensitive to three types of constraints: the properties of the stimulus, the infants' attentional control skills (which improve with age and brain maturation) and their previous linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. The goal of the present paper is to present a probabilistic model to simulate infants' visual attention control to talking faces as a function of their language learning environment (monolingual vs.

Complexity of STG signals and linguistic rhythm: a methodological study for EEG data.

The superior temporal and the Heschl's gyri of the human brain play a fundamental role in speech processing. Neurons synchronize their activity to the amplitude envelope of the speech signal to extract acoustic and linguistic features, a process known as neural tracking/entrainment. Electroencephalography has been extensively used in language-related research due to its high temporal resolution and reduced cost, but it does not allow for a precise source localization.

Abstract processing of syllabic structures in early infancy.

Syllables are one of the fundamental building blocks of early language acquisition. From birth onwards, infants preferentially segment, process and represent the speech into syllable-sized units, raising the question of what type of computations infants are able to perform on these perceptual units. Syllables are abstract units structured in a way that allows grouping phonemes into sequences.

Sensitivity to the sonority sequencing principle in rats (Rattus norvegicus).

Albeit diverse, human languages exhibit universal structures. A salient example is the syllable, an important structure of language acquisition. The structure of syllables is determined by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), a linguistic constraint according to which phoneme intensity must increase at onset, reaching a peak at nucleus (vowel), and decline at offset.

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach.

Since there are no systematic pauses delimiting words in speech, the problem of word segmentation is formidable even for monolingual infants. We use computational modeling to assess whether word segmentation is substantially harder in a bilingual than a monolingual setting. Seven algorithms representing different cognitive approaches to segmentation are applied to transcriptions of naturalistic input to young children, carefully processed to generate perfectly matched monolingual and bilingual corpora.

Second-language phoneme learning positively relates to voice recognition abilities in the native language: Evidence from behavior and brain potentials.

Previous studies suggest a relationship between second-language learning and voice recognition processes, but the nature of such relation remains poorly understood. The present study investigates whether phoneme learning relates to voice recognition. A group of bilinguals that varied in their discrimination of a second-language phoneme contrast participated in this study.

Infants' representation of asymmetric social influence.

In social groups, some individuals have more influence than others, for example, because they are learned from or because they coordinate collective actions. Identifying these influential individuals is crucial to learn about one's social environment. Here, we tested whether infants represent asymmetric social influence among individuals from observing the imitation of movements in the absence of any observable coercion or order.

Before perceptual narrowing: The emergence of the native sounds of language.

The present study investigates the precursors of representations of phonemes in 4.5-month-olds. The emergence of phonemes has been mainly studied within the framework of perceptual narrowing, that is, infants tuning to their native language and losing sensitivity to non-native speech.

Early life multiple exposures and child cognitive function: A multi-centric birth cohort study in six European countries.

Epidemiological studies mostly focus on single environmental exposures. This study aims to systematically assess associations between a wide range of prenatal and childhood environmental exposures and cognition. The study sample included data of 1298 mother-child pairs, children were 6-11 years-old, from six European birth cohorts.

The ontogeny of early language discrimination: Beyond rhythm.

Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability to perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. The cues that infants use to discriminate between prosodically close languages remain elusive.

Infants' representation of social hierarchies in absence of physical dominance.

Social hierarchies are ubiquitous in all human relations since birth, but little is known about how they emerge during infancy. Previous studies have shown that infants can represent hierarchical relationships when they arise from the physical superiority of one agent over the other, but humans have the capacity to allocate social status in others through cues that not necessary entail agents' physical formidability. Here we investigate infants' capacity to recognize the social status of different agents when there are no observable cues of physical dominance.

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study.

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.

Experience with research paradigms relates to infants' direction of preference.

Interpreting and predicting direction of preference in infant research has been a thorny issue for decades. Several factors have been proposed to account for familiarity versus novelty preferences, including age, length of exposure, and task complexity. The current study explores an additional dimension: experience with the experimental paradigm.

Efficiency as a principle for social preferences in infancy.

Two separate research lines have shown that (1) infants expect agents to move efficiently toward goal states and that (2) infants navigate the social world selectively, preferring some individuals to others and attributing social preferences to others' agents. Here, we studied how the expectation of efficient actions influences infants' looking preferences and their inferences about others' preferences. We presented 15-month-olds with a set of videos containing three geometric figures depicting social agents.

Infants' expectations about the recipients of infant-directed and adult-directed speech.

Across cultures, adults produce infant-directed speech (IDS) when addressing infants. We explored whether infants expect IDS to be directed at infants and adult-directed speech (ADS) to adults. Infants from Spain and Turkey (12-15 months) watched animated videos with geometric figures, where one adult figure talked to an infant or another adult figure, while they were gazing at each other (Experiments 1 and 2).

Maternal seafood consumption during pregnancy and child attention outcomes: a cohort study with gene effect modification by PUFA-related genes.

Background: There is a need to test the fetal programming theoretical framework in nutritional epidemiology. We evaluated whether maternal seafood intake during pregnancy was associated with 8-year-old attention outcomes after adjusting for previous child seafood intake and cognitive function. We also explored effect modification by several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related with polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) metabolism.

Traces of statistical learning in the brain's functional connectivity after artificial language exposure.

Our environment is full of statistical regularities, and we are attuned to learn about these regularities by employing Statistical Learning (SL), a domain-general ability that enables the implicit detection of probabilistic regularities in our surrounding environment. The role of brain connectivity on SL has been previously explored, highlighting the relevance of structural and functional connections between frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices. However, whether SL can induce changes in the functional connections of the resting state brain has yet to be investigated.

Evoked and oscillatory EEG activity differentiates language discrimination in young monolingual and bilingual infants.

Language discrimination is one of the core differences between bilingual and monolingual language acquisition. Here, we investigate the earliest brain specialization induced by it. Following previous research, we hypothesize that bilingual native language discrimination is a complex process involving specific processing of the prosodic properties of the speech signal.

Motor cortex compensates for lack of sensory and motor experience during auditory speech perception.

Listening to speech has been shown to activate motor regions, as measured by corticobulbar excitability. In this experiment, we explored if motor regions are also recruited during listening to non-native speech, for which we lack both sensory and motor experience. By administering Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) over the left motor cortex we recorded corticobulbar excitability of the lip muscles when Italian participants listened to native-like and non-native German vowels.

Social context modulates cognitive markers in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Error monitoring, cognitive control and motor inhibition control are proposed as cognitive alterations disrupted in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD has also been associated with an increased sensitivity to social evaluations. The effect of a social simulation over electrophysiological indices of cognitive alterations in OCD was examined.

Developmental Trajectories in Primary Schoolchildren Using n-Back Task.

Background: Neuropsychological instruments to assess cognitive trajectories during childhood in epidemiological studies are needed. This would improve neurodevelopment characterization in order to identify its potential determinants. We aimed to study whether repeated measures of n-back, a working memory task, detect developmental trajectories in schoolchildren during a 1-year follow-up.

The influence of bilingualism on the preference for the mouth region of dynamic faces.

Bilingual infants show an extended period of looking at the mouth of talking faces, which provides them with additional articulatory cues that can be used to boost the challenging situation of learning two languages (Pons, Bosch & Lewkowicz, 2015). However, the eye region also provides fundamental cues for emotion perception and recognition, as well as communication. Here, we explored whether the adaptations resulting from learning two languages are specific to linguistic content or if they also influence the focus of attention when looking at dynamic faces.