Dr Perrine Brusini PhD

In this project funded by the ESRC through the LuCiD research center, we aim to understand the neural processes involved in processing language and how these might differ in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Listening to speech requires processing very rapid information (4 syllables per second), identifying the information (what the different syllables are), and tracking how the information is related (if the syllables are part of the same word or from different words). We aim to understand how the brain integrates this information to process incoming speech and organise the stream of syllables into words using two electroencephalography (EEG), which provides very precise timing information of brain activity.
Recent advances in neuroimaging techniques and analyses allow us to see how different parts of the brain interact during specific tasks. We will use these new techniques to determine how listeners organise syllables into words. We will determine what this process looks like in typical adults and then extend this to typically developing children to see how these integration systems develop, and then we will extend this to children with DLD to determine whether disruptions to the integration system might explain DLD.LuCiD webpage

Error-based theories of language acquisition posit that predictions are a key part of language processing throughout the lifespan. They suggest that adults and children are constantly anticipating upcoming input, assess these predictions and use discrepancies to update their linguistic knowledge. So far there is limited evidence that infants are able to form predictions as they listen speech, consequently prediction as a learning mechanism may not be viable. Here, we directly test the ability of 9-month-old infants to form prediction. To achieve this, we have adapted an adult EEG study focusing on syllabic prediction (Vidal et al., 2019) for an infant population. Here, we rely on the presence of mismatch-response (MMR) to establish whether infants predicted the upcoming syllable of an invented word. As infants’ MMR can vary, we will also carry out a second task to localize participants’ individual MMR responses in the form of a tone-change-detection Optimum-1 task. This task will determine the location, latency and polarity of the MMR for each infant separately. Here, we will present the very first result from an adult group and from some infant data.The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the project's Open Science Framework site