Project Content:
Children start to recognize patterns in their environment early in life. This is an important skill, to recognize individual words within a speech stream, which is necessary for language learning. What is unknown so far, is at which point in development this skill emerges. Is it possible to show this skill already before birth? To investigate this, we use a tone sequence with tone triplets that always occur together and can be learned due to that statistical property. With the help of fMEG we measure the neural entrainment of these sequences and quantify learning on a neuronal basis. For this study we measure fetuses between 32 and 36 weeks of gestation and an additional sample of newborns.
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