Mueller, J. , Friederici, A. D. & Männel, C.
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science
The ability to discover remote dependencies between speech units is a basic requirement for language acquisition. We applied event-related potentials in a passive oddball paradigm to test whether this capacity is influenced by the development of auditory perception. Standard stimuli consisted of three-syllabic spoken sequences that followed two different AXB rules for which A syllables predicted B syllables with variable X syllables. Interspersed among standards were pitch deviants and rule deviants, i.e. violations of the final B element according to the AXB rules. Infants were grouped according to the polarity of their mismatch responses to the pitch deviant as an index for the maturational status of the auditory cortex. Only those infants who showed a negativity for the pitch deviants showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. In an adult control group no rule deviance effects were found. We conclude that the ability to extract remote dependencies is present in early infancy and critically depends on the maturational status of basic auditory mechanisms. Interestingly, it seems to be absent in its automatic form in adulthood. Future research is needed to test the impact of the observed early interindividual differences in perceptual functions on later stages of language acquisition.