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Free keywords:
Infant speech perception; Modality differences; Inferior frontal cortex; fNIRS
Abstract:
Despite increasing interest in the development of audiovisual speech perception in infancy, the underlying mechanisms and neural processes are still only poorly understood. In addition to regions in temporal cortex associated with speech processing and multimodal integration, such as superior temporal sulcus, left inferior frontal cortex (IFC) has been suggested to be critically involved in mapping information from different mod- alitiesduringspeechperception.TofurtherilluminatetheroleofIFCduringinfantlanguagelearningandspeech perception,thecurrentstudyexaminedtheprocessingofauditory, visualandaudiovisualspeechin6-month-old infants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our results revealed that infants recruit speech- sensitive regions in frontal cortex including IFC regardless of whether they processed unimodal or multimodal speech. We argue that IFC may play an important role in associating multimodal speech information during the early steps of language learning.
