[BIC-announce] CRBLM Talk

[Vincent Gracco, Dr.]

Victoria Leong, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Cambridge, UK

CRBLM Seminar
Wednesday, November 5 2014 at 3:00 pm
Goodman Cancer Centre, Room 501
1160 av des Pins, Montreal, QC

The role of neural rhythmic entrainment in early language learning
Young children spontaneously develop awareness of "big" phonological (speech sound) units like prosodic stress patterns, syllables and rhymes. By ~2 years of age, children can count the number of syllables in a word, and say whether two words rhyme. Remarkably, even 7.5-month-old infants can use prosodic rhythm (motifs of strong and weak syllables) to segment words from continuous speech. These are complex feats of speech engineering, requiring the child to de-construct the overt acoustic spectro-temporal structure of the speech signal in order to reveal the latent phonological building blocks of the English language - a nested hierarchy of prosodic stress patterns, syllables and onset-rime units. This ability to hack the acoustic signal for its structural components is particularly crucial for infants, who have to infer and build a phonological system from the ground up.

I will present a simple computational model which simulates how infants might accomplish this remarkable feat by tapping into the "Acoustic-Emergent Phonology (AEP)" within the speech signal. AEP is an emergent property of the oscillatory architecture of the speech signal that provides a blueprint for phonological structure. I further suggest that this process of acoustic-phonological extraction is mediated neurally by multi-timescale rhythmic entrainment of neuronal oscillations in the auditory cortex. I will then address the possibility that poor rhythmic entrainment by the dyslexic brain results in faulty extraction of phonology from the speech signal, producing the classic phonological deficit that characterises dyslexia. Finally, I will discuss how rhythmically-rich language devices like Motherese and nursery rhymes act to enhance neural entrainment, which could be an important mechanism for language learning as well as for the establishment of interpersonal synchrony.

 http://www.crblm.ca/events/role_neural_rhythmic_entrainment_early_language_learning
Host: Vincent Gracco
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