Does Speech Emerge From Earlier Appearing Oral Motor Behaviors?

Does speech emerge from earlier appearing oral motor behaviors?

This investigation was designed to quantify the coordinative organization of mandibular muscles in toddlers during speech and nonspeech behaviors. Seven 15-month-olds were observed during spontaneous production of chewing, sucking, babbling, and speech. Comparison of mandibular coordination across these behaviors revealed that, even for children in the earliest stages of true word production, c...

Earlier speech exposure does not accelerate speech acquisition.

Critical periods in language acquisition have been discussed primarily with reference to studies of people who are deaf or bilingual. Here, we provide evidence on the opening of sensitivity to the linguistic environment by studying the response to a change of phoneme at a native and nonnative phonetic boundary in full-term and preterm human infants using event-related potentials. Full-term infa...

Behaviors that Emerge from Emotion and Cognition: A First Evaluation

This paper presents an initial evaluation of an emotions model developed for a sophisticated synthetic forces model. Sponsored by ARI, the objective of this research is to make the decision-making process of complex agents less predictable and more realistic, by incorporating emotional factors that affect humans. To this end, we have adopted an approach that promotes the emergence of behavior a...

What does motor efference copy represent? Evidence from speech production.

How precisely does the brain predict the sensory consequences of our actions? Efference copy is thought to reflect the predicted sensation of self-produced motor acts, such as the auditory feedback heard while speaking. Here, we use magnetoencephalographic imaging (MEG-I) in human speakers to demonstrate that efference copy prediction does not track movement variability across repetitions of th...

Does Binocular Rivalry Emerge from Cortical Mechanisms of 3D Vision