Infants' Neural Basis for Language Using New NIRS

描述（由申请人提供）：我们提出一种全新的应用新的脑成像技术（近红外光谱，NIRS）来解决一个困扰科学家近40年的尚未解决的科学争论：婴儿如何从周围不断变化的语言和感知流中发现他们语言的语音构建块？近红外光谱（NIRS）是一种非侵入性光学技术，与功能磁共振成像（fMRI）一样，它可以测量大脑血液动力学活动，从而让我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。与功能磁共振成像不同，近红外成像非常便携，对儿童友好（孩子可以坐在家里、实验室或学校的妈妈腿上），比功能磁共振成像更能容忍运动（参与者可以发声/说话），并且可以用于警觉的婴儿。标准化的行为任务涉及(i)视觉感知，（ii）听觉感知，以及（iii）原生和非原生语音感知，将在近红外光谱记录期间用于“年幼”（3-4个月）和“年老”（13-14个月）婴儿和成人，以测试关于特定组织（和神经组织网络）及其语言或一般听觉感知功能的特定半球内神经解剖学假设。我们以这种方式将这种令人兴奋的新近红外光谱技术用于婴儿，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重因素以及控制它们的特定类型的加工组织，(b)语言和一般听觉加工组织的发展轨迹，(c)语言和听觉处理组织在早期发展中对某些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争论，即语言特异性和感知-一般机制是否启动/控制早期语言学习，并揭示早期生活中整合的多种因素，以促进儿童后来健康的语言成长。这些发现和我们的计划一起为NIRS在婴儿中的原则性应用提供指导，可能最终被用于识别和预测有语言/序列障碍风险的婴儿（例如，阅读障碍），甚至在他们咿呀学语或说出第一个单词之前。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科学的“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.