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Description:
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This book establishes a dialog between experimental psychology and
electrophysiology in the study of infant language development. On the one
hand, traditional methods of investigation into language development have
reached a high level of refinement despite being confined to observing
infants’ overt behavioral responses. On the other hand, more recent methods
such as neuroimaging and, in particular, event-related potentials provide
access to implicit responses from the infant brain while often relying on
rather gross experimental contrasts. The aims of this book are both to
provide neuroscientists with an overview of the ingenious behavioral
paradigms that have been developed in the field of language development and
to introduce the power of neurophysiological indices to behavioral
experimentalists. The two approaches are compared at various levels of
processing: phonetic discrimination, categorical perception, speech
segmentation, syllable and word recognition, semantic priming. A general
discussion brings together the two approaches, highlights their respective
contributions and limitations and proposes constructive ideas for future
integration.
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