Optical Neuroimaging of Infants' Preferential Listening

描述(由申请人提供)： 理解儿童如何在流利的语言中辨认单个单词，对于理解第一语言的发展至关重要。从根本上说，语言学习既需要识别技能，也需要分割技能。如果婴儿不能将输入话语分解成组成成分，并确定产生的听觉对象是否是特定语言类型的样本，他们就不可能学习单个成分的含义以及这些部分是如何组合在一起的。表征单位(如单词)是婴幼儿发展句法和语义知识的基础。通过将传统的婴儿语音感知过程与已建立的光学神经成像形式相结合，这项申请中提出的研究将为研究人员提供一种新的工具来解释非常年幼婴儿的行为数据。这项应用的目的是利用近红外光谱(NIRS)识别不同年龄段婴儿词汇表征的神经关联。一组5.5个月和10个月大的婴儿将使用改进的优先监听程序进行测试，他们头上戴着一套定制的光学成像探头和探测器。本研究的具体目的是(1)为表现出熟悉和新奇听力偏好的婴儿群体构建神经活动定位图；(2)区分幼儿的语义听觉记忆和情景听觉记忆。这项拟议研究的中心假设是，光学神经成像将揭示婴儿对单词的细微差别表征，而不是行为传达的熟悉和新奇效应所能展示的。这些研究的结果将被用来促进婴儿语言学习的理论。这些理论将加深我们对正常语言发展和异常语言发展的理解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding how a child comes to identify individual words within fluent speech is crucial to understanding first language development. Fundamentally, language learning requires both recognition and segmentation skills. If infants cannot break input utterances into constituent components and determine whether the resulting auditory objects are exemplars of particular linguistic types, it will be impossible for them to learn what individual components mean and how these parts fit together. The representational units (e.g., words) serve as the basis upon which infants develop syntactic and semantic knowledge. By coupling a traditional infant speech perception procedure with an established form of optical neuroimaging, the research proposed in this application will provide researchers with a new tool for interpreting behavioral data from very young infants. The objective of this application is to identify neural correlates of lexical representations in infants of different ages using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). Groups of infants--aged 5.5 months and 10 months--will be tested using a modified preferential listening procedure while wearing a set of custom optical imaging probes and detectors on their heads. The specific aims of this study are to (1) construct localized maps of neural activity for groups of infants displaying familiarity and novelty listening preferences, and (2) differentiate between semantic and episodic auditory memory in young infants. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that optical neuroimaging will reveal that infants have more nuanced representations of words than behaviorally conveyed familiarity and novelty effects can demonstrate. The outcome of these studies will be used to advance theories of infant language learning. These theories will further our understanding of both normal and abnormal language development.