TY - JOUR
T1 - Sound symbolism processing is lateralized to the right temporal region in the prelinguistic infant brain
AU - Yang, Jiale
AU - Asano, Michiko
AU - Kanazawa, So
AU - Yamaguchi, Masami K.
AU - Imai, Mutsumi
N1 - Funding Information:
Special thanks to the infants and their parents for their kindness and cooperation. This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow (16J05067 to J.Y.), Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Shitsukan” (16H01677 to M.K.Y. and 18H05014 to S.K.) and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Evolinguistics” (18H05084 to M.I.) both from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the JSPS (19K23388 to J.Y., 26285167 to M.K.Y. and 16H01928 to M.I.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Sound symbolism, which is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between a word and its meaning, has been suggested to bootstrap language acquisition in infants. However, it is unclear how sound symbolism is processed in the infants’ brain. To address this issue, we investigated the cortical response in 11-month-old infants in relation to sound-symbolic correspondences using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Two types of stimuli were presented: a novel visual stimulus (e.g., a round shape) followed by a novel auditory stimulus that either sound-symbolically matched (moma) or mismatched (kipi) the shape. We found a significant hemodynamic increase in the right temporal area, when the sound and the referent sound were symbolically matched, but this effect was limited to the moma stimulus. The anatomical locus corresponds to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), which is thought to process sound symbolism in adults. These findings suggest that prelinguistic infants have the biological basis to detect cross-modal correspondences between word sounds and visual referents.
AB - Sound symbolism, which is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between a word and its meaning, has been suggested to bootstrap language acquisition in infants. However, it is unclear how sound symbolism is processed in the infants’ brain. To address this issue, we investigated the cortical response in 11-month-old infants in relation to sound-symbolic correspondences using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Two types of stimuli were presented: a novel visual stimulus (e.g., a round shape) followed by a novel auditory stimulus that either sound-symbolically matched (moma) or mismatched (kipi) the shape. We found a significant hemodynamic increase in the right temporal area, when the sound and the referent sound were symbolically matched, but this effect was limited to the moma stimulus. The anatomical locus corresponds to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), which is thought to process sound symbolism in adults. These findings suggest that prelinguistic infants have the biological basis to detect cross-modal correspondences between word sounds and visual referents.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41598-019-49917-0
DO - 10.1038/s41598-019-49917-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 31530863
AN - SCOPUS:85072288835
SN - 2045-2322
VL - 9
JO - Scientific Reports
JF - Scientific Reports
IS - 1
M1 - 13435
ER -