François, C. . 1, 2, 3 , Teixido, M. . 1, 3 , Agut-Quijan, T. . 4 , Bosch, L. . 1, 3, 5 & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. 1, 2, 6
1 Department of Basic Psychology, University of Barcelona
2 Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute, L?Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona
3 Attention, Perception and Acquisition of Language Lab, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu
4 Servicio de Neonatología, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu
5 Instituto de investigación en cerebro, cognición y conducta, IR3C
6 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, ICREA
In order to build their lexicon, infants have to pick up the words that are embedded in a continuous stream of syllables. Because speech segmentation is one of the first steps of language acquisition, understanding how this cognitive process unfolds in early infancy is important for better defining the origin of later cognitive and linguistic deficits often observed in children born pre-term or in children with language learning deficits. However, little is known whether newborns have this skill already present at birth. Interestingly, there is evidence showing that prosodic cues such as pitch variations facilitate the segmentation process. Here, we present results of Event-related Potentials derived from electro-encephalographic activity recorded in 20 2 days-old sleeping neonates while they were presented with both flat contour and musically enriched streams of artificial syllables. We found brain signatures of successful segmentation for musically enriched but not for flat contour streams. These results provide neural evidence of the benefit of prosody in the first steps of language acquisition.