Newborn infants show predictive inference of syllables in word-like items

Ylinen, S. . 1 , Suppanen, E. . 1 , Winkler, I. . 2 & Kujala, T. 1

1 Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki
2 Deparment of Experimental Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest

To facilitate adaptive behavior, the brain aims to predict future sensory events. A recent study by Ylinen et al. (in press, Developmental Science) showed that such predictive inference is linked with word recognition and learning in 12- and 24-month-old children. Negative-polarity auditory event-related potentials (ERP) were elicited when the preceding word context predicted familiar word endings, whereas word-expectancy violations generated prediction error (PE) responses of positive polarity. PE strength correlated with vocabulary scores at 12 months. Here we exposed newborn infants (N=19, mean age 7 days) with bisyllabic pseudowords AB and CD (p=0.5 for each) during ERP measurement. Then we presented the familiarized pseudoword AB (p=0.8), where A was expected to create predictions of B if learned, and occasional deviant pseudowords CD, CB, AD and AX (p=0.05 for each) in an oddball paradigm. AD and AX violating the predictions elicited significant PE responses of positive polarity. In contrast, familiarized CD elicited a negative response, resembling the word familiarity effect observed at 12 months. The findings suggest that newborns can learn to recognize potential words. Importantly, their brain automatically creates predictions about word endings after hearing a familiarized word beginning. Predictive inference may thus facilitate even the earliest language development.