Silvia Nieva Ramos
Researcher in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Processes and Speech Therapy of the Faculty of Psychology
The study is of high quality and has passed peer review. The research team is from Paris Descartes University (Paris Cité) and has been reviewed by the ethics committee of the university. It is based on sound data and methods.
The article starts from well-established premises in research: neonates have intrauterine perception, in particular they process phonoprosodic features (intonation, melody, rhythmic qualities...), they have reference to the mother tongue and the mother's voice and can discriminate languages of different rhythmic structures.
The aim of the study is to see the dynamic changes at the neural level in brain plasticity, supported by learning and memory. It compares the mother tongue, French (with previous intrauterine exposure from about 24 weeks of gestation, generally from 28 weeks) with other non-exposed languages of different rhythmic type (one of them with the same rhythmic type, Spanish, and another with a different rhythmic type, English). In this case, the differences between these languages have to do with the duration of the syllables, the syllables in Spanish and French all have the same duration, and in English there are syllables of different duration.
What this study contributes is at the methodological level. This type of research has been done mainly with behavioural analysis, so any contribution with techniques that allow us to observe brain activity is a relevant contribution.
The limitations are those of the technique itself, as there are more advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as magnetoencephalography, but they are more costly and complex to adapt for use in infants.
This work could be a preliminary step towards the use of this type of technique, and it also shows that research is needed on mother tongues other than English.
In Guo's (2022) bibliometric analysis we can see that one of the most studied topics on infant language acquisition is speech perception, speech processing.
In Kidd & Garcia (2022) we can see that most of the studies that are done are on English mother tongue, although there is a tendency to change and this study contributes to the study of infants learning French.