Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Abstract

Neonates show broad-based, universal speech perception abilities, allowing them to acquire any language. Moreover, an increasing body of research shows that prenatal experience with speech, which is a low-pass signal mainly preserving prosody, already shapes those abilities. In this review, we first provide a summary of the empirical evidence available today on newborns’ universal and experience-modulated speech perception abilities. We then interpret these findings in a new framework, focusing on the role of the prenatal prosodic experience in speech perception development. We argue that the chronological sequence of infants’ experience with speech, starting before birth with a low-pass filtered signal and continuing with the full-band signal after birth, sets up the prosodic hierarchy and a cascade of embedded neural oscillations as its brain correlate, laying the foundations for language acquisition. Prosody, constituting infants’ very first experience with language, may thus play a fundamental role in speech perception and language development.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.