Annotation: Language learning begins before birth. During the last trimester of gestation, the fetus is exposed to the rhythm, prosody, and sounds of the surrounding language, providing early opportunities for learning. Yet, the nature of the neural representations supported by the early experience with the ambient language remains unclear. In this talk, I will present a series of studies examining neural processing of speech in newborn infants. Using complementary neuroimaging methods, namely, EEG, ERPs, and fNIRS, we investigated newborns’ responses to native and non-native language input, language-specific rhythmic patterns, and speech sounds differing in their linguistic relevance, as well as developmental changes associated with gestational maturity. The findings show that newborns are sensitive to multiple levels of speech structure and that, at least to some extent, neural responses to speech reflect prenatal experience with the ambient language. Together, these studies provide insight into how the foundations of language processing are established at the very beginning of life.

Biography: Kateřina Chládková is a psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist interested in how humans learn language from the very beginning of life. Her research combines methods from linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience to study speech perception and language acquisition in infants and adults. Her work on native-language learning focuses on neural processing of speech in newborns and infants, including those with atypical development, and on the role of prenatal experience in shaping the foundations of language development. She is affiliated with the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Prague, where she leads the SPEAKin Lab.

IPHYS contact: Olga Zimmermannová; olga.zimmermannova@fgu.cas.cz