Itziar Lozano (Postdoctoral Researcher at the Neurocognitive Development Lab Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Before Words: Early Behavioural and Neural Markers of Language Development.
Dr Itziar Lozano, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Neurocognitive Development Lab, Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Early language acquisition begins long before infants produce their first words. During the first year of life, infants rely on early perceptual, attentional, and brain-based mechanisms to make sense of the spoken language(s) surrounding them. Understanding how these mechanisms operate during infancy and toddlerhood is essential for explaining how language develops, and why some young children follow neurodivergent developmental pathways.
Drawing on data from my doctoral research and ongoing collaborative work across multiple international Babylabs, this talk will introduce eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) studies that examine how infants and toddlers learn from speech across the first two years of life, and how these early fundamental skills support their later vocabulary development. The talk is organised around two key developmental stages.
In the first part, I will focus on audiovisual speech processing during infancy (the first year of life). I will address how infants learn to integrate what they see (the mouth movements of talking faces) with what they hear (speech sounds), and how early visual attention to speech predicts their later language outcomes. I will also present research examining whether infants with a family history of autism show different developmental trajectories in this foundational skill, and whether biological sex contributes to individual differences in how this early skill supports language and social communication development in autism.
In the second part, I will turn to early behavioural and neural markers of vocabulary learning in toddlerhood (the second year of life). I will explain how brain maturation and early language experience shape the emergence of early neural responses to word learning (such as the N400 event-related potential, which is thought to reflect emerging semantic processing and predict later vocabulary development). I will also discuss whether toddlers continue to rely on visual information from a speaker’s mouth to support learning new words.
Overall, this talk aims to show how infant-friendly experimental designs and careful measurement of their early behaviour and brain activity can reveal the foundations of language learning across infancy and toddlerhood, before children speak fluently Also, why this knowledge is important for education, early identification, early support, and understanding developmental neurodiversity.
For my short bio and more on my research and team see: https://sites.google.com/view/itziarlozano/