Object labeling and disambiguation in 4-month-old infants.

The account that word learning starts in earnest during the second year of life, when infants have mastered the disambiguation skills, has recently been challenged by evidence that infants during the first year already know many common words. The preliminary ability to rapidly map and disambiguate linguistic labels was tested in Italian-speaking infants (N = 96, 47 boys; age = 4 and 6 months, eye tracking). Infants can rapidly map linguistic labels to objects and movements, and disambiguate the intended referents to novel words, but they fail with sinewave analogs. In hearing infants, mapping and disambiguation emerge early in development, and are flexible as to which visual referents infants are willing to map to linguistic labels, but may be constrained to linguistic sounds.

Symbolic and deictic gestures as a tool to promote parent-child communication in the context of hearing loss: A systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Language and communication outcomes in children with congenital sensorineural hearing loss (cSNHL) are highly variable, and some of this variance can be attributed to the quantity and quality of language input. In this paper, we build from the evidence that human language is inherently multimodal and positive scaffolding of children's linguistic, cognitive, and social-relational development can be supported by Parent Centered Early Interventions (PCEI), to suggest that the use of gestures in these interventions could be a beneficial approach, yet scarcely explored. AIMS AND METHODS: This systematic review aimed to examine the literature on PCEI focused on gestures (symbolic and deictic) used to enhance the caregiver-child relationship and infant's language development, in both typically and atypically developing populations. The systematic review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. From 246 identified studies, 8 met PICO inclusion criteria and were eligible for inclusion. Two reviewers screened papers before completing data extraction and risk of bias assessment using the RoB2 Cochrane scale. RESULTS: Included studies measured the effect of implementing symbolic or deictic gestures in daily communication on the relational aspects of mother/parent-child interaction or on language skills in infants. The studies indicate that gesture-oriented PCEI may benefit deprived populations such as atypically developing children, children from low-income families, and children who, for individual reasons, lag behind their peers in communication. CONCLUSIONS: Although gesture-oriented PCEI appear to be beneficial in the early intervention for atypically developing populations, this approach has been so far scarcely explored directly in the context of hearing loss. Yet, symbolic gestures being a natural part of early vocabulary acquisition that emerges spontaneously regardless of hearing status, this approach could represent a promising line of intervention in infants with cSNHL, especially those with a worse head start.

The timeline of non-vocal and vocal communicative skills in infants with hearing loss.

Objective: The study investigates what is the link between early verbal and non-vocal abilities, when does predominantly verbal communicative style occur after the intervention with cochlear implants (CI) or hearing aids (HA), and how predictive it is of later linguistic development in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) infants and children. Methods: Cohort: children with moderate-to-profound hearing impairment (N = 49, 20 girls, mean age at HA or CI intervention = 15 months, range: 4-35 months). Measures: Receptive and productive vocabulary at 24 and 36 months and video analysis at 12 months post-intervention. Analysis: Predictive values of total and verbal responses to communicative turns for later vocabulary development were assessed, as well as the relative time course of the development of vocal/verbal communication in DHH children. Results: Vocabulary at 24 months is predicted by auditory responses at 12 months, as well as by overall responsiveness before intervention. Non-vocal responses decline and overall verbal responses increase significantly between 6 and 12 months after intervention. The trend is delayed in children with delayed (>12 months of age) treatment with CI or HA. Conclusions: Age of intervention affects the development of vocal/verbal communicative style. Language development, in particular, vocabulary growth, can be further stimulated by the enhancement of preverbal (both vocal and non-vocal) communicative skills.

Assessment of Communication Abilities in Four Children with Early Bilateral CIs in Clinical and Home Environments with LENA System: A Case Report.

Children's language acquisition is underpinned by the quantity and quality of linguistic stimulation. Early diagnosis and cochlear implantation (CI), along with a family-centered intervention, are regarded as critical factors in providing appropriate language stimulation and thus supporting successful language outcomes in children with sensory neural hearing loss (SNHL). Considering the lack of tools to assess early language skills and open issues regarding the early predictors of CI outcomes, our goal was to evaluate the potential usability of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system as an early assessment and/or predictive tool. Clinical video recordings, LENA home recordings, and vocabulary scores were used to assess the progression of communication abilities of four children with CIs (6-35 m.o.). The data revealed a positive correlation between the estimated mean length of utterance (EMLU), vocal conversational turns (CT) in clinical video recordings, and receptive vocabulary, as well as the CT count in LENA being a significant predictor of productive vocabulary. These findings lead us to conclude that the LENA system has the potential to be used as an additional (tele-)measure in the early assessment of communication abilities of children with CI, as well as as a tool in the research of early predictors of CI outcomes.

Attention to Speech and Music in Young Children with Bilateral Cochlear Implants: A Pupillometry Study.

Early bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) may enhance attention to speech, and reduce cognitive load in noisy environments. However, it is sometimes difficult to measure speech perception and listening effort, especially in very young children. Behavioral measures cannot always be obtained in young/uncooperative children, whereas objective measures are either difficult to assess or do not reliably correlate with behavioral measures. Recent studies have thus explored pupillometry as a possible objective measure. Here, pupillometry is introduced to assess attention to speech and music in noise in very young children with bilateral CIs (N = 14, age: 17-47 months), and in the age-matched group of normally-hearing (NH) children (N = 14, age: 22-48 months). The results show that the response to speech was affected by the presence of background noise only in children with CIs, but not NH children. Conversely, the presence of background noise altered pupil response to music only in in NH children. We conclude that whereas speech and music may receive comparable attention in comparable listening conditions, in young children with CIs, controlling for background noise affects attention to speech and speech processing more than in NH children. Potential implementations of the results for rehabilitation procedures are discussed.

Empathy at birth: Mother's cortex synchronizes with that of her newborn in pain.

Early neonatal relation with the caregiver is vital for newborn survival and for the promotion of an appropriate neural development. The aim of this study was to assess if the empathic cortical response of a mother to her baby's pain is synchronized with the neonatal cortical response to the painful stimulation. We used hyperscanning, a functional neuroimaging approach that allows studying functional synchronization between two brains. Sixteen mother-newborn dyads were recruited. Maternal and neonatal cortical activities were simultaneously monitored, by near-infrared spectroscopy, during a heel prick performed on the baby and observed by the mother. Multiple paired t test was used to identify cortical activation, and wavelet transform coherence method was used to explore possible synchronization between the maternal and neonatal cortical areas. Activations were observed in mother's parietal cortex, bilaterally, and in newborn's superior motor/somatosensory cortex. The main functional synchronization analysis showed that mother's left parietal cortex activity cross-correlated with that of her newborn's superior motor/somatosensory cortex. Such synchronization dynamically changed throughout assessment, becoming positively cross-correlated only after the leading role in synchronizing cortical activities was taken up by the newborn. Thus, maternal empathic cortical response to baby pain was guided by and synchronized to the newborn's cortical response to pain. We conclude that, in case of potential danger for the infant, brain areas involved in mother-newborn relationship appear to be already co-regulated at birth.

The Influence of Hearing Impairment on Mental Age in Down Syndrome: Preliminary Results.

The increased life expectancy for patients with Down Syndrome (DS) has elicited the need to improve their quality of life by enhancing functional outcomes and identifying the factors that contribute to their long-term cognitive decline. Although the majority of individuals with DS have issues with hearing impairment (HI) since early childhood, to our knowledge no study has investigated whether HI represents a potential modulator of cognitive decline over time. The present explorative cohort study, albeit very preliminary due to the limited cohort (17 children), highlights the significant relation of a significant HI not only with receptive language abilities, but also with mental age in young patients with DS. Additional studies are required to confirm the link between HI and mental age and to assess the impact of audiological treatment on the enhancement of functional outcomes and of cognitive decline in individuals with DS.

Reliability of parental assessment of auditory skills in young children: a cross-sectional study in Italian language.

OBJECTIVE: Hearing impairments (HIs) that progress or have later onset may have specific effects on language and cognitive development, but are difficult to suspect during routine primary care visits. Family concern regarding hearing is thought to represent an important risk factor requiring audiological examination. Yet it is not clear how successful parents are in recognising the consequences or specific suspect elements of HI in young children. The aim of this study is to verify whether parents of at-risk children recognise the presence of HI through a parental questionnaire that draws attention to auditory skills development and compares them with language and communication skills. DESIGN: Observational study. SETTING: From 2013 to 2019, parents were administered the Questionnaire on Hearing and Communication Abilities before audiological evaluation of their children at a secondary care institute. PARTICIPANTS: 309 Italian children (1-36 months old) at risk of HI. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Questionnaire sensitivity in predicting the presence and type of HI. RESULTS: Parents report a decrease in auditory skills for children with sensorineural HI (Χ2(2)=14.4, p=0.003), with an increased concern expressed in 59% compared with 24% in normally hearing children. Both auditory (r=-0.18, p=0.002) and comprehension (r=-0.13, p=0.057) skills weakly but negatively correlated with a diagnosis of HI. On discriminant analysis, the positive predictive value of the questionnaire was 0.78, but with low sensitivity (0.39). CONCLUSIONS: Parents of children with a verified risk of HI have some capacity to recognise non-typical auditory behaviour. Thus, it is important to assess parental concerns during primary care health visits, and a targeted questionnaire on auditory abilities can complement existing screening procedures. However, given the low sensitivity of the questionnaire, we conclude that for a reliable detection of HIs that progress or have later onset an objective screening tool is always required.

Prosody facilitates learning the word order in a new language.

One of the prominent ideas developed by Jacques Mehler and his colleagues was that perceptual tuning, present from birth on, enables infants, and language learners in general, to extract regularities from speech input. Here we discuss language learners'' ability to extract basic word order (VO or OV) structure from prosodic regularities in a language. The two are closely related: in phonological phrases of VO languages, the most prominent word is the rightmost one, and in OV languages, it is the leftmost one. In speech, this prominence is realized as extended duration, or as elevated pitch, sometimes combined with changes in intensity. When learning the first (L1) or the second language (L2), exposure to relevant rhythmic structure elicits implicit learning about syntactic structure, including the basic word order. However, it remains unclear whether triggering the learning process requires a certain level of familiarity with the relevant rhythm. It is moreover unknown whether prosodic information can help L2 learners to extract and learn the vocabulary of a new language. We tested Spanish- and Italian-speaking adults' ability to learn words from an artificial language with either non-native OV or native VO word order. The results show that learners used prosodic information to identify the most prominent words in short utterances when the artificial language was similar to the native language, with duration-based prominence in prosody and a VO word order. In contrast, when the artificial language had a non-native prominence marked by pitch alternations and an OV word order, prominent words were learned only after a three-day exposure to the relevant rhythmic structure. Thus, for adult L2 learners, only repeated exposure to the relevant prosody elicited learning new words from an unknown language with non-native prosodic marking, indicating that, with familiarity, prosodic cues can facilitate learning in L2.

Short report on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 face protective equipment on verbal communication.

OBJECTIVE: To predict the impact of face personal protective equipment on verbal communication during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. DESIGN: We assessed the effect of common types and combinations of face personal protective equipment on speech intelligibility in quiet and in a simulated noisy environment. RESULTS: Wearing face personal protective equipment impairs transmission of middle-to-high voice frequencies and affects speech intelligibility. Surgical masks are responsible for up to 23.3% loss of speech intelligibility in noisy environments. The effects are larger in the condition of advanced face personal protective equipment, accounting for up to 69.0% reduction of speech intelligibility. CONCLUSION: The use of face personal protective equipment causes significant verbal communication issues. Healthcare workers, school-aged children, and people affected by voice and hearing disorders may represent specific at-risk groups for impaired speech intelligibility.

Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology language.

Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies "one, and not two". To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., "a button") when their language features an immediate "successor" that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English-speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Listening Effort in Young Children with Cochlear Implants.

Very early bilateral implantation is thought to significantly reduce the attentional effort required to acquire spoken language, and consequently offer a profound improvement in quality of life. Despite the early intervention, however, auditory and communicative outcomes in children with cochlear implants remain poorer than in hearing children. The distorted auditory input via the cochlear implants requires more auditory attention resulting in increased listening effort and fatigue. Listening effort and fatigue may critically affect attention to speech, and in turn language processing, which may help to explain the variation in language and communication abilities. However, measuring attention to speech and listening effort is demanding in infants and very young children. Three objective techniques for measuring listening effort are presented in this paper that may address the challenges of testing very young and/or uncooperative children with cochlear implants: pupillometry, electroencephalography, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We review the studies of listening effort that used these techniques in paediatric populations with hearing loss, and discuss potential benefits of the systematic evaluation of listening effort in these populations.

WordSeg: Standardizing unsupervised word form segmentation from text.

A basic task in first language acquisition likely involves discovering the boundaries between words or morphemes in input where these basic units are not overtly segmented. A number of unsupervised learning algorithms have been proposed in the last 20 years for these purposes, some of which have been implemented computationally, but whose results remain difficult to compare across papers. We created a tool that is open source, enables reproducible results, and encourages cumulative science in this domain. WordSeg has a modular architecture: It combines a set of corpora description routines, multiple algorithms varying in complexity and cognitive assumptions (including several that were not publicly available, or insufficiently documented), and a rich evaluation package. In the paper, we illustrate the use of this package by analyzing a corpus of child-directed speech in various ways, which further allows us to make recommendations for experimental design of follow-up work. Supplementary materials allow readers to reproduce every result in this paper, and detailed online instructions further enable them to go beyond what we have done. Moreover, the system can be installed within container software that ensures a stable and reliable environment. Finally, by virtue of its modular architecture and transparency, WordSeg can work as an open-source platform, to which other researchers can add their own segmentation algorithms.

Co-occurrence statistics as a language-dependent cue for speech segmentation.

To what extent can language acquisition be explained in terms of different associative learning mechanisms? It has been hypothesized that distributional regularities in spoken languages are strong enough to elicit statistical learning about dependencies among speech units. Distributional regularities could be a useful cue for word learning even without rich language-specific knowledge. However, it is not clear how strong and reliable the distributional cues are that humans might use to segment speech. We investigate cross-linguistic viability of different statistical learning strategies by analyzing child-directed speech corpora from nine languages and by modeling possible statistics-based speech segmentations. We show that languages vary as to which statistical segmentation strategies are most successful. The variability of the results can be partially explained by systematic differences between languages, such as rhythmical differences. The results confirm previous findings that different statistical learning strategies are successful in different languages and suggest that infants may have to primarily rely on non-statistical cues when they begin their process of speech segmentation.

Phonological skills, visual attention span, and visual stress in developmental dyslexia.

In this study, we concurrently investigated 3 possible causes of dyslexia-a phonological deficit, visual stress, and a reduced visual attention span-in a large population of 164 dyslexic and 118 control French children, aged between 8 and 13 years old. We found that most dyslexic children showed a phonological deficit, either in terms of response accuracy (92.1% of the sample), speed (84.8%), or both (79.3%). Deficits in visual attention span, as measured by partial report ability, affected 28.1% of dyslexic participants, all of which also showed a phonological deficit. Visual stress, as measured by subjective reports of visual discomfort, affected 5.5% of dyslexic participants, not more than controls (8.5%). Although phonological variables explained a large amount of variance in literacy skills, visual variables did not explain any additional variance. Finally, children with comorbid phonological and visual deficits did not show more severe reading disability than children with a pure phonological deficit. These results (a) confirm the importance of phonological deficits in dyslexia; (b) suggest that visual attention span may play a role, but a minor one, at least in this population; (c) do not support any involvement of visual stress in dyslexia. Among the factors that may explain some differences with previously published studies, the present sample is characterized by very stringent inclusion criteria, in terms of the severity of reading disability and in terms of exclusion of comorbidities. This may exacerbate the role of phonological deficits to the detriment of other factors playing a role in reading acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spontaneous object and movement representations in 4-month-old human infants and albino Swiss mice.

Can young infants decompose visual events into independent representations of objects and movements? Previous studies suggest that human infants may be born with the notion of objects but there is little evidence for movement representations during the first months of life. We devised a novel Rapid Visual Recognition Procedure to test whether the nervous system is innately disposed for the conceptual decomposition of visual events. We show that 4-month-old infants can spontaneously build object and movement representations and recognize these in partially matching test events. Also albino Swiss mice that were tested on a comparable procedure could spontaneously build detailed mental representations of moving objects. Our results dissociate the ability to conceptually decompose physical events into objects and spatio-temporal relations from various types of human and non-human specific experience, and suggest that the nervous system is genetically predisposed to anticipate the representation of objects and movements in both humans and non-human species.