Katharina Menn

Tilburg University | UVT · Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology

Infants prefer to be addressed with infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS benefits language acquisition through amplified low-frequency amplitude modulations. It has been reported that this amplification increases electrophysiological tracking of IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is still unknown which particular frequency band triggers t...

During speech processing, neural activity in non-autistic adults and infants tracks the speech envelope. Recent research in adults indicates that this neural tracking relates to linguistic knowledge and may be reduced in autism. Such reduced tracking, if present already in infancy, could impede language development. In the current study, we focused...

Infants master temporal patterns of their native language at a developmental trajectory from slow to fast: Shortly after birth, they recognize the slow acoustic modulations specific to their native language before tuning into faster language-specific patterns between 6 and 12 months of age. We propose here that this trajectory is constrained by neu...

The late development of fast brain activity in infancy restricts initial processing abilities to slow information. Nevertheless, infants acquire the short-lived speech sounds of their native language during their first year of life. Here, we trace the early buildup of the infant phoneme inventory with naturalistic electroencephalogram. We apply the...

Children are active learners: they selectively attend to important information. Rhythmic neural tracking of speech is central to active language learning. This chapter evaluates recent research showing that neural oscillations in the infant brain synchronise with the rhythm of speech, tracking it at different frequencies. This process predicts word...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that has been related to an overall imbalance between the brain's excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) systems. Such an EI imbalance can lead to structural and functional cortical deviances and thus alter information processing in the brain, ultimately giving rise to autism traits. However, the developmental tr...

During language acquisition, infant speech perception becomes selective for the speech sounds of their native language. It is unclear how infants can infer native speech sounds given a critical neurobiological limitation:The infant brain is too slow to match the rate of speech sounds-or phonemes-in natural speech. Infant brains are characterized ex...

Abstract Infants master temporal patterns of their native language at a developmental trajectory from slow to fast: Shortly after birth, they recognize the slow acoustic modulations specific to their native language before tuning into faster language-specific patterns between 6-12 months of age. We here propose that this trajectory is constrained b...

During speech processing, neural activity in non-autistic adults and infants tracks the speech envelope. Recent research in adults indicates that this neural tracking relates to linguistic knowledge and may be reduced in autism. Such reduced tracking, if present already in infancy, could impede language development. In the current study, we focused...

Infants prefer to be addressed with infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS benefits language acquisition through amplified low-frequency amplitude modulations. It has been reported that this amplification increases electrophysiological tracking of IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is still unknown which particular frequency band triggers t...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...