H2020Индивидуална стипендия2022–2024

BabyMindReader · a multivariate NIRS-EEG neural decoder to decipher newborns' inital representations of speech prosody

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2022-01-01 → 2024-11-22
Финансиране от ЕС: 183 473 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Невронните механизми, чрез които новородените разпознават интонацията и ритъма на речта, се анализират чрез едновременен запис на мозъчната активност. Това помага да се разбере как започва усвояването на езика още преди раждането.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

BabyMindReader: a multivariate NIRS-EEG neural decoder to decipher newborns' inital representations of speech prosody

When they are born, human infants are linguistic “citizens of the world” : they already possess such a wide range of broad and universal perceptual abilities that they can start learning any language(s), and they do it quickly and effortlessly during the first years of life. How do they learn so easily? This question has been long investigated, first with behavioral methods and then with neuroimaging. Findings that emerged during the last decades have added an important piece to the picture: the acquisition of language already starts before birth. Despite a growing body of research, the neural underpinnings of this exquisitely human ability are still unclear. The overall objective of the BabyMindReader project is to shed light on this issue with an innovative interdisciplinary approach that brings together long-established experimental methods in infant language research with the most forefront technical advancements in the machine learning field. The value of the project is both theoretical and methodological, because it aims at advancing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the very early stages of language acquisition while at the same time overcoming technical challenges behind infant multimodal neuroimaging: in particular, in this project, these questions will be investigated by recording newborns' concurrent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalograpy (EEG) signals. NIRS and EEG provide different information, in that NIRS yields information, with good spatial localization, about the functional activation of cortical areas in responses to stimuli elicited by the metabolic consumption of oxygen, while the EEG measures, with great temporal resolution, the neural activity that supports that activation. Therefore, the concurrent registration of the two modalities holds great potential for shedding light, in a all-round fashion, on the neuro-functional mechanisms underlying language acquisition. Nevertheless, it poses methodological challenges both for the experimental design and for the data analysis. Solving these challenges will be of great value for the infant neuroimaging communities, and it is one of the objectives of this project.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Infants are born with a wide range of broad and universal perceptual abilities that allow them to start learning any language immediately. Findings that emerged over the last decades suggest that the acquisition of language starts already before birth, and lead to the hypothesis that the main feature of speech that humans learn prenatally is prosody. According to this proposal, prosodic information acts as a bootstrap, preparing the newborn to first recognize the relevant sound patterns of their native language, and then supporting him/her during the first year of life in learning its grammar and lexicon . Although this compelling idea is supported by considerable amount of evidence, a direct test that infants are born with a clear neural representation of prosody is still missing. The BabyMindReader project aims at casting light on this matter with an innovative interdisciplinary approach that brings together experimental methods in infant language research with technical advancements in the artificial intelligence (AI) field: infants’ brain responses to stimuli characterized by different prosody will be measured in two different experiments, by means of co-registered NIRS and EEG, two of the most employed neuroimaging techniques in the infant research. Hemodynamic correlates of electrical activity in response to auditory stimuli will be characterized; based on this step, features will be selected and used to develop a multivariate classifier, by means of machine-learning methods, that will be employed to decode newborns’ initial neural representations of prosody. The BabyMindReader project will on one hand introduce methodological innovations for NIRS-EEG coregistration and analysis that will be of great impact for the whole developmental community and beyond; second, it will provide a direct characterization of the role of prenatal learning of prosody, thus contributing to theoretical advancements in the research on the basis of language acquisition.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA · PadovaКоординаторИталия