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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/122517
Enhanced Neonatal brain responses to sung streams predict vocabulary outcomes by age 18 months
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Words and melodies are some of the basic elements infants are able to extract early in life from the auditory input. Whether melodic cues contained in songs can facilitate word-form extraction immediately after birth remained unexplored. Here, we provided converging neural and computational evidence of the early benefit of melodies for language acquisition. Twenty-eight neonates were tested on their ability to extract word-forms from continuous flows of sung and spoken syllabic sequences. We found different brain dynamics for sung and spoken streams and observed successful detection of word-form violations in the sung condition only. Furthermore, neonatal brain responses for sung streams predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months as demonstrated by multiple regression and cross-validation analyses. These findings suggest that early neural individual differences in prosodic speech processing might be a good indicator of later language outcomes and could be considered as a relevant factor in the development of infants' language skills.
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FRANÇOIS, Clément, et al. Enhanced Neonatal brain responses to sung streams predict vocabulary outcomes by age 18 months. Scientific Reports. 2017. Vol. 7, num. 1, pags. 12451. ISSN 2045-2322. [consulted: 14 of August of 2026]. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/122517