31 Mar
2016
31 Mar
'16
1:40 p.m.
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its next talk by
Victoria Leong (University of Cambridge)
( http://www.cne.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/vvec2@cam.ac.uk)
Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - 17:00-18:30
Host: Agnes Kovacs
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 street 7, room 101.
How Infants Learn Language Using Speech Rhythm and Neuronal Oscillations
Young children spontaneously develop awareness of "big" phonological (speech
sound) units such as prosodic stress patterns, syllables and rhymes. By 7.5 months,
infants can use prosodic rhythm (motifs of strong and weak syllables) to segment words
from continuous speech. This is a complex feat of speech engineering, requiring the child
to "hack" the acoustic signal for its implicit phonological structure. In this
talk, I will present converging computational and experimental evidence which suggests
that infants could perform this feat through speech-to-brain coupling. This a process by
which endogenous neuronal oscillations in the cortex entrain to a temporally-matched
hierarchy of rhythmic patterns in the speech signal. Nursery rhymes and other forms of
infant-directed speech have an enhanced and exaggerated rhythmic architecture which
provides a rich substrate for acoustic-phonological extraction by the infant brain.
Finally, I will provide preliminary evidence that brain-to-brain coupling between adults
and infants could provide an early neural mechanism for the development of joint
attention, which plays a important social modulatory role in early language learning.
See more at:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/events/2016-04-06/departmental-colloquium-v…
We are looking forward to see you there!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/events
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