Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life

Giovanni M. Di Liberto (), Adam Attaheri, Giorgia Cantisani, Richard B. Reilly, Áine Ní Choisdealbha, Sinead Rocha, Perrine Brusini and Usha Goswami
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Giovanni M. Di Liberto: The University of Dublin
Adam Attaheri: University of Cambridge
Giorgia Cantisani: The University of Dublin
Richard B. Reilly: The University of Dublin
Áine Ní Choisdealbha: University of Cambridge
Sinead Rocha: University of Cambridge
Perrine Brusini: University of Cambridge
Usha Goswami: University of Cambridge

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43490-x

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