Infant Neural Tracking and Phonological Awareness at Pre-School Age

Abstract

A growing body of research shows that neural tracking of language, especially infant-directed speech, is related to a child’s subsequent language development. These studies equated language development with vocabulary size, but the relations with other linguistic abilities remain unknown. Phonological awareness (PA), or the ability to assess the sound structure of a language and to apply this understanding in expressive language, is a vital ability for formal reading and writing education. Therefore, the relationship between neural tracking and later phonological awareness was explored. A sample of 145 Dutch children watched a video of five naturalistically sung nursery rhymes during an EEG recording at 10 months old. From these EEG recordings and the speech envelope of the stimuli, speech-brain coherence (SBC) was calculated for stress rate (1-3 Hz), syllabic rate (3-5 Hz), and phonemic rate (5-15 Hz). During follow-up research at age 4:0-6:11, their PA was tested with the CELF Preschool-2NL. Multiple linear regression models were fitted on these two measures to predict PA scores with SBC values. Age at both moments of testing and an age-normed general language ability score were included as covariates, based on two baseline models. While the testing model was significant (F(6, 139) = 9.670, p < .001, R2 = .295), none of the SBC values significantly predicted PA (for all values: p > .36). These results indicate that SBC during the first year of life does not relate to phonological awareness at early school age. However, to convincingly draw conclusions on this relationship, examining this relationship at different time intervals and points, and using different language measures is necessary.