Since the introduction of near-infrared spectroscopy, its use has grown dramatically in the neurosciences, particularly in developmental cognitive neuroscience,^1,2 due to its many practical advantages: ease of use, portability, noninvasiveness, and low cost.

Objectives: The present work aims to contribute to the debate on the relationship between discrimination and production abilities in older pre-school-aged children and to fill a gap in the literature by providing evidence about this relationship in typically developing children speaking Italian, a language that is under-investigated. Methods: Two novel tests, an AX ‘same/different’ phonological discrimination test and a phonetic test, were administered to a sample of Italian pre-school children aged 72–78 months. Discrimination was tested at the feature and the syllable levels. Production was analyzed for consonant repertoire and the presence of phonological processes, such as devoicing or consonant cluster reduction. Results: In the AX test, significantly worse performance was found for syllables than for individual features. However, in production, no significant difference was found among phonological processes. No significant correlations were found between children’s performance in the two tests. Conclusion: The current data suggest that children’s discrimination and production abilities for speech are still developing after age 6. There is no complete overlap between what children produce and what they discriminate. The implications of these findings for theories of language development are discussed.

The erratum documents correction of erroneous captions for Figs. 5-7.

SignificanceDeaf and hard-of-hearing infants’ hemodynamic response function (HRF) has not yet been characterized. However, without an appropriate estimate of their HRF, neuroimaging modalities relying on hemodynamic responses, e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), cannot be used reliably in this population, e.g., prior to and following cochlear implantation. We contribute to better theoretical models of and more suitable therapeutic interventions for the neural changes induced by auditory and language deprivation in deaf infants.AimWe aim to characterize the parameters of the HRF of deaf and hard-of-hearing infants in response to Italian.ApproachWe measured 2- to 20-month-old Italian-exposed infants’ HRF to Italian using fNIRS in the bilateral temporal, i.e., auditory, cortices. We characterized the HRF for all infants and for three clinically relevant subsets: (i) monolingual Italian infants, (ii) genetically deaf infants, and (iii) infants aged 5 to 12 months. We computed the following parameters: peak amplitude, time-to-peak, full width at half maximum, and where present, the amplitude and latency of the initial dip and/or the final undershoot, using a model-based parameter fitting approach. We statistically compared these HRF parameters to those of typically hearing infants.ResultsDeaf and typically hearing infants showed largely similar HRFs, with both groups reaching comparable main peak amplitudes. Minor differences have been found in the latencies of some response components.ConclusionsOur results provide the first detailed characterization of the hemodynamic response to native-language speech in deaf and hard-of-hearing infants, improving clinical and therapeutic approaches through more accurate analysis of fMRI and fNIRS data.

This contribution provides new data on Italian first language acquisition and phonological development in preschool children. In total, 104 3- to 6;4-year-old typically developing Italian children were tested with two novel nonword tasks tackling the Italian consonantal system: one for repetition (NWR) and one for discrimination (NWD). NWR data were analyzed in terms of repetition accuracy, featural characteristics, and phonological processes, while NWD was analyzed according to signal detection theory (i.e., A-prime and d-prime) and in terms of discrimination accuracy. The results show the significant role of age on children’s repetition and discrimination abilities: as the children grow older, all the scores improve and the number of errors declines. No complete overlap is found between what children can produce and what they can discriminate, which is in line with what has already been documented in other languages. The findings contribute to the state of the art on the Italian language and provide new perspectives on some methodological issues specific to this language.

Speech perception and production are linked in adults. Since infants show sophisticated speech perception abilities before they produce language, the link has been assumed to emerge with development. However, crying is a communication signal that infants produce from birth and their cry melodies are modulated by prenatally heard speech. Cries and speech may thus be developmentally continuous, and the production-perception link may be most evident early in life for cries. We therefore examined whether newborns perceive cries similarly to speech. French neonates exposed to French cries and French speech showed greater neural responses to cries than to speech in the right temporal region. By contrast, Italian adults unfamiliar with French responded more strongly to speech than to cries. Newborns' heightened response to a communicative signal that is less familiar and acoustically less complex, but one they can produce suggests that vocal production and auditory perception may be linked from birth.