Infants' Neural Basis for Language Using New NIRS

描述（由申请人提供）：我们提出了一个全新的应用程序的新的大脑成像技术（近红外光谱，NIRS）到一个以前悬而未决的科学争论，困扰了科学家近40年：如何年轻的婴儿发现他们的语言的语音积木从不断变化的语言和感知流在他们周围？NIRS是一种非侵入性的光学技术，与功能磁共振成像一样，可以测量大脑的血液动力学活动，从而允许人们在处理语言和认知任务的特定方面时“看到”儿童和成人的大脑内部。与fMRI不同，NIRS非常便携，对儿童友好（孩子可以坐在家里，实验室或学校的妈妈的腿上），比fMRI更能容忍运动（参与者可以发声/说话），并且可以用于警觉的婴儿。标准化行为任务，包括（i）视觉感知，（ii）听觉感知，和（iii）母语和非母语语音感知将与“年轻”（3-4个月）和“老年”一起使用。（13-14个月）婴儿和成人在近红外光谱记录，以测试特定半球内的神经解剖学假设的特定组织（和神经组织网络）和它们的语言或一般听觉感知功能。我们以这种方式对婴儿使用这种令人兴奋的新NIRS技术，将为以下科学问题提供重要的解决方案：（a）早期语言习得和一般听觉感知的多种因素以及控制它们的特定类型的处理组织，（B）语言和一般听觉处理组织的发育轨迹，以及（c）在早期发育中，语言和听觉处理组织对某些类型的输入的敏感度达到峰值。这项工作将有助于解决经典的科学辩论是否语言特定与感知一般机制启动/管理早期语言学习，并揭示了多种因素，成为集成在早期生活中，以促进儿童以后的健康语言成长。这些发现，以及我们计划为婴儿NIRS的原则性使用提供指南，最终可能用于识别和预测有语言/测序障碍风险的婴儿（例如，甚至在他们牙牙学语或说出他们的第一个字之前。这些关于儿童语音能力的发现也将为成功的语言学习和阅读中的分词提供至关重要的科学“循证”信息，并将影响美国关于早期语言补救和教学的教育政策。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose an entirely new application of new brain imaging technology (Near Infrared Spectroscopy, NIRS) to a previously unresolved scientific debate that has puzzled scientists for nearly 40 years: How do young infants discover the phonetic building blocks of their language from the constantly varying linguistic and perceptual stream around them? NIRS is non-invasive optical technology that, like fMRI, measures cerebral hemodynamic activity and thus permits 1 to "see" inside the brains of children and adults while processing specific aspects of language and cognitive tasks. Unlike fMRI, NIRS is highly portable, child-friendly (child can be seated on mom's lap in home, lab or school), tolerates movement more than fMRI (participants can vocalize/talk), and can be used with alert babies. Standardized behavioral tasks involving (i) visual perception, (ii) auditory perception, and (iii) native and non-native phonetic perception will be used with "young" (3-4 mo) and "old" (13-14 mo) infants and adults during NIRS recordings to test specific within- hemisphere neuroanatomical hypotheses about specific tissue (and networks of neural tissue) and their linguistic or general auditory perception functions. Our use of this exciting new NIRS technology with infants in this way will provide important resolutions to scientific questions about (a) the multiple factors that underlie early language acquisition and general auditory perception and the specific type of processing tissue that govern them, (b) the developmental trajectories of linguistic and general auditory processing tissue, and (c) the peaked sensitivity that linguistic and auditory processing tissue has to certain kinds of input over others in early development. This work will help resolve classic scientific debate about whether language-specific versus perception-general mechanisms initiate/govern early language learning, and lay bare the multiple factors that become integrated in early life to promote later healthy language growth in children. These findings, with our plan to provide guidelines for the principled use of NIRS with infants, may ultimately be used to identify and predict babies at risk for language/sequencing disorders (e.g., dyslexia) even before they babble or utter their first words. These findings about children's phonological capacity will also provide scientific "evidence-based" information vital to word segmentation in successful language learning and reading and will impact U.S. educational policy regarding early language remediation and teaching.