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 ______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu