Brain Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition

By Patricia K. Kuhl. Neuron, 2010

740 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The last decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children’s early processing of language. Noninvasive, safe functional brain measurements have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. The phonetic level of language is especially accessible to experimental studies that document the innate state and the effect of learning on the brain. The neural signatures of learning at the phonetic level can be documented at a remarkably early point in development. Continuity in linguistic development from infants’ earliest brain responses to phonetic stimuli is reflected in their language and pre-reading abilities in the second, third and fifth year of life, a finding with theoretical and clinical impact. There is evidence that early mastery of the phonetic units of language requires learning in a social context. Neuroscience on early language learning is beginning to reveal the multiple brain systems that underlie the human language faculty.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Pharmacy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8733d190550c46dd01578822883d4d04d509917b

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Citations in the corpus

Age group and sex differences in performance on a computerized neurocognitive battery in children age 8–21 (2012, neutral): “…Luciana, Hooper, & Yarger, 2007; Goldberg, Maurer, & Lewis, 2001; Pickering, 2001), language and reasoning (e.g., Friederici & Wartenburger, 2010; Kuhl, 2010) and, more recently, social cognition (e.g., Burnett, Sebastian, Cohen-Kadosh, & Blakemore, 2010; Shaw, Grosbras, Leonard, Pike, & Paus,…”
Role of emergent neural activity in visual map development (2013, neutral): “The extraordinary developmental plasticity of the nervous system is underscored in the visual deprivation experiments conducted by Hubel and Wiesel [1], and is experienced by each of us as we learn our native language as infants but struggle to learn a second language as adults [2].”
Nurturing Nature: How Brain Development Is Inherently Social and Emotional, and What This Means for Education (2019, background): “044 Kuhl, P. K. (2010). Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition.”
Supermarket Speak: Increasing Talk Among Low-Socioeconomic Status (2015, background): “Because healthy neural development relies on linguistic and social interactions (Blakemore, 2010; Kuhl, 2010), these findings support the notion that children growing up in lower SES households can derive important benefits from language-based interventions like the one implemented in this study.”
Perceptual beginnings to language acquisition (2018, positive): “These findings have been strengthened by more recent work using event-related potentials, megaencephalography, and functional nearinfrared spectroscopy measures for phonetic discrimination (see Gervain & Mehler, 2010; Kuhl, 2010, for reviews).”
Adolescence as a Sensitive Period of Brain Development. (2015, neutral): “Language development, too, generally shows heightened plasticity in childhood [11,12], although there is no single sensitive period for language.”
Critical periods in speech perception: new directions. (2015, background): “A similar relation has been reported between infant speech perception and later reading success (see Kuhl 2010).”
Learning Foreign Language Vocabulary with Gestures and Pictures Enhances Vocabulary Memory for Several Months Post-Learning in Eight-Year-Old School Children (2020, background): “When acquiring their native language, individuals accumulate extensive multisensory and sensorimotor experience with caregivers and the environment (Kuhl 2010).”
Gestures Enhance Foreign Language Learning (2012, background): “In fact, children make sensorimotor experiences by interacting intensively with their caregivers and their environment (Tomasello 2005; Kuhl 2010).”
Musical training as a framework for brain plasticity: behavior, function, and structure. (2012, background): “Through exposure during the first few months and years of life, a quick narrowing to the relevant cultural sounds takes place, both for music (e.g., scale properties) and speech sounds (e.g., phonemes and prosody) (Kuhl, 2010).”