The Cerebral Bases of Language Acquisition

Abstract

International audienceThe development of noninvasive brain-imaging techniques has opened the black box of the infant brain. Instead of postulating theories based on the delayed consequences of, fortunately rare, early lesions, we can now study healthy infant responses to speech. Rather than a brain limited to primary areas or, on the contrary, a poorly specialized brain, brain-imaging studies have revealed a functional architecture in infants that is close to what is described in adults. In particular, a hierarchy of increasingly integrated computations is observed along the superior temporal regions, and the processing of different speech features is already segregated along parallel neural pathways with different hemispheric biases. Yet, although highly structured, the infant brain still differs from the adult brain, with particularly delayed brain responses arising from frontal regions. We can expect that a better understanding of the computational abilities of this early network may provide insight into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition