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Poster B17, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall

Newborn infants show predictive inference of syllables in word-like items

Emma Suppanen1, István Winkler2, Teija Kujala1, Sari Ylinen1,3;1Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Institute of Psychology and Logopedics, University of Helsinki, 2Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 3CICERO Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki

The brain aims to predict future sensory events to facilitate adaptive behavior. A recent study by Ylinen et al. (2017, Developmental Science) showed that such predictive inference is linked with word recognition and learning in 12- and 24-month-old children. Negative-polarity auditory event-related potentials (ERP) were elicited when the preceding word context predicted familiar word endings, whereas word-expectancy violations generated prediction error (PE) responses of positive polarity. PE strength correlated with vocabulary scores at 12 months. Here we aimed to investigate whether the facilitative effect of predictive inference on learning from auditory input can be observed already in newborn infants. We exposed newborn infants (N=75, mean age 9.3 days) to bisyllabic pseudowords AB and CD (p=0.5 for each) during ERP measurement. Then we used an oddball paradigm to probe prediction and learning effects. Standard stimulus was the familiarized pseudoword AB (p=0.8), where A was expected to create predictions of B if learned. Occasional deviant pseudowords were CD, CB, AD and AX (p=0.05 for each). We expected correct predictions to elicit suppressed responses, and prediction errors to elicit larger responses. We repeated the measurement when infants were 12 months old (N=65, mean age 369 days). The deviant pseudoword CB was left out from stimuli presented to 12-month-olds in order to make the measurement time shorter (p=0.79 for standard, and p=0.07 for each deviant word-like item). In newborns AD and AX violating the predictions elicited significant PE responses of positive polarity. In contrast, familiarized CD elicited a negative response, resembling the word familiarity effect observed at 12 months by Ylinen et al. (2017). The same kind of pattern repeated for 12-month-olds with faster responses to AD than AX. The findings suggest that newborns can learn to recognize potential words. Importantly, their brain automatically creates predictions about word endings after hearing a familiarized word beginning. Predictive inference may thus facilitate even the earliest language development.

Themes: Development, Speech Perception
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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