Youth, Nutrition and Behaviour

Healthy nutrition is widely assumed to have a beneficial influence on educational performance and social behaviour. Yet research in developed countries about the effects of food intake on children's behaviour and school performance is limited. We propose a randomised controlled field experiment to study the effects of a school lunch programme in the Netherlands, based on an overview of studies by LEI and Food and Biobased Research, both part of Wageningen UR

Continuous-speech segmentation at the beginning of language acquisition: electrophysiological evidence

Contains fulltext : 30213_contseatt.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Word segmentation, or detecting word boundaries in continuous speech, is not an easy task. Spoken language does not contain silences to indicate word boundaries and words partly overlap due to coarticalution. Still, adults listening to their native language perceive speech as individual words. They are able to combine different distributional cues in the language, such as the statistical distribution of sounds and metrical cues, with lexical information, to efficiently detect word boundaries. Infants in the first year of life do not command these cues. However, already between seven and ten months of age, before they know word meaning, infants learn to segment words from speech. This important step in language acquisition is the topic of this dissertation. In chapter 2, the first Event Related Brain Potential (ERP) study on word segmentation in Dutch ten-month-olds is discussed. The results show that ten-month-olds can already segment words with a strong-weak stress pattern from speech and they need roughly the first half of a word to do so. Chapter 3 deals with segmentation of words beginning with a weak syllable, as a considerable number of words in Dutch do not follow the predominant strong-weak stress pattern. The results show that ten-month-olds still largely rely on the strong syllable in the language, and do not show an ERP response to the initial weak syllable. In chapter 4, seven-month-old infants' segmentation of strong-weak words was studied. An ERP response was found to strong-weak words presented in sentences. However, a behavioral response was not found in an additional Headturn Preference Procedure study. There results suggest that the ERP response is a precursor to the behavioral response that infants show at a later age.RU Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 22 oktober 2007Promotores : Hagoort, P., Cutler, A.188 p

Electrophysiological evidence for prelinguistic infants' word recognition in continuous speech

Contains fulltext : 56806.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Children begin to talk at about age one. The vocabulary they need to do so must be built on perceptual evidence and, indeed, infants begin to recognize spoken words long before they talk. Most of the utterances infants hear, however, are continuous, without pauses between words, so constructing a vocabulary requires them to decompose continuous speech in order to extract the individual words. Here we present electrophysiological evidence that 10-month-old infants recognize two-syllable words they have previously heard only in isolation when these words are presented anew in continuous speech. Moreover, they only need roughly the first syllable of the word to begin doing this. Thus pre-linguistic infants command a highly efficient procedure for segmentation and recognition of spoken words in the absence of an existing vocabulary, allowing them to tackle effectively the problem of bootstrapping a lexicon out of the highly variable, continuous speech signals in their environment

Reflections on reflections of infant word recognition

Contains fulltext : 73035.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access

Word segmentation from continuous speech: An ERP study with 10-month-old infants

Item does not contain fulltextBehavioral studies have shown that infants can segment some words from continuous speech well before they begin to speak - from about 7.5 months of age for English-learning infants and from at least 9 months of age for Dutch-learning infants. The predominant stress pattern of these languages seems to be an important cue in acquiring the word segmentation skill. To further study this important step in language acquisition we designed a new auditory ERP (Event-Related Potential) repetition paradigm. In this paradigm an experimental block consisted of 10 tokens of the same bisyllabic strong/weak word, followed by 8 sentences of which half contain the familiarized word. Both the lists of words in isolation and the sentences were recorded by a female speaker in a lively, infant-directed manner. EEG (ElectroEncephaloGram) was measured during both the lists and the sentences. The results from 28 Dutch 10-month-old infants show an ERP effect of familiarization in both the word lists and the sentences: In the word lists positivity reduces with increasing word position and in the sentences the repeated words show an effect in the same direction, namely a negative deflection as compared to similar new words in sentences. Both effects appear well before the end of the word. These results confirm that 10-month-old infants can indeed segment bisyllabic strong/weak words from continuous speech. Moreover, infants need very little time to recognize words either in isolation or in continuous speech. This new paradigm opens the way for detailed study of word segmentation by infants.1 p

My idol eats carrots, so do I? The delayed effect of a classroom-based intervention on 4–6-year-old children’s intake of a familiar vegetable

This study aimed to investigate the effect of a role modelling intervention on children’s intake of a familiar vegetable. Ninety nine 4–6-year-old children participated at school in a between-subject experiment with three conditions. Two popular Dutch TV idols acted as enthusiastic role models in a video film that was specifically designed for this study. In the convivial eating (CE) condition, children ate raw carrots while they watched the role modelling video for eight sessions (2x/week). Children in the positive restriction and convivial eating (PR + CE) condition were – prior to eight convivial eating sessions – involved in five sessions where they watched the video without eating carrots themselves. The control group ate carrots twice only, and never watched the role modelling video. The main outcome was vegetable intake. Information on demographics and child eating characteristics was collected via a parental questionnaire. A longer-term follow-up was executed at nine months (N = 93). Children’s average carrot intake was 22 ± 24 g per intervention session. There was no increased intake directly after the intervention, but carrot intake in both intervention groups (CE: 45 g; PR + CE: 52 g) was 20–30 g higher at nine months (p < 0.01), whereas intake remained stable for the control group (p = 0.31). About 40% of all children consistently ate (almost) no carrots; higher fussiness and neophobia, and lower vegetable liking typified these non-eaters. So, although the intervention did not immediately increase children’s vegetable intake, it was associated with a higher intake at follow-up. The high numbers of non-eaters points to the need for tailored interventions that encourage non-eaters to consume relatively familiar – but previously rejected – vegetables

Brain potentials for word segmentation at seven months predict later language development

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Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times

Contains fulltext : 55776.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations