Casting light on language acquisition in the newborn brain: evidence for early speech and prosodic specialization

Human infants begin acquiring their native language well before they utter their first words, but what exactly their brain encodes at the earliest stages remains an open question.
In this talk, recent evidence will be presented showing that functional near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) reveals neural sensitivity to speech and some of its key dimensions from the first days of life. Newborns were found to show selective cortical responses to human speech compared with non-speech vocalizations, reflecting early functional specialization. Additional evidence demonstrates a specific sensitivity to the prosodic structure, including rhythm and intonation, which appears to be encoded at birth and may be shaped by prenatal experience.
Building on these findings, evidence from a combined NIRS-EEG approach will be presented, highlighting both its challenges and potential. While interpretation can be challenging due to the pronounced inter-subject variability typical of infant data, this multimodal approach offers unique advantages, as it captures both the fast temporal dynamics underlying linguistic and auditory processing and the concurrent spatial organization of the involved cortical networks. Together, these features provide a richer framework for investigating early processing mechanisms in the newborn brain.
Taken together, these studies suggest that the newborn brain is already organized to support speech processing in specialized ways. By combining long-established paradigms from the language acquisition domain, theoretically motivated hypotheses, and methodologically innovative frameworks for infant neuroimaging, they provide new insight into the neural foundations of language and enhance the interpretability of functional signals at the earliest stages of human development.
 

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