Infants track the rhythms of speech and song
Hello! I am a postdoctoral fellow at Western University studying music and language development. I received my doctorate in Experimental Psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2016. My current research focuses on how listeners track the syllable rhythms of music and language using EEG. In particular, I examine whether the ability to track syllable rhythms is related to language outcomes for infants and children.
**Due to COVID-19, I do not have childcare for my baby at the moment, so I will have limited availability at my poster.
If I am not at my poster, please send me an email (christinavb@gmail.com) with questions, thoughts, or comments.
Infants track the rhythms of speech and song
Infants are drawn to the musical features of infant-directed (ID) speech (e.g., Fernald, 1989). Infants and adults learn language more quickly from ID speech and song compared to adult-directed utterances (Thiessen et al., 2005; Schön et al., 2008). Musical structure may help listeners neurally track syllable onsets, which could relate to better learning from musical features in speech. We examined how infant’s brains track the rhythms of spoken and sung utterances and monotone spoken and sung utterances to examine the importance of exaggerated and musical prosody. Our study used cerebro-acoustic phase coherence as an index of syllable-rhythm tracking of speech (VBdN et al., 2020). Both adults and infants phase-locked to the syllable rhythms of speech and song, even when it lacked prosody. However, there was no difference between any of the conditions. This is one of the first demonstrations of low-frequency phase-locking in 4-month-olds.
Second zoom sesssion info for after 4:10:
christinavb@gmail.com is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Christina's 2nd Zoom Meeting
Time: Aug 11, 2020 04:10 PM America/Toronto
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