Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

The human brain is a flexible information processing system. Across a range of simple and complex tasks, such as walking across the street to playing basketball, the brain transforms sensory information from the environment into corresponding motor actions. This sensory input to motor output transformation likely requires a sequence of complex…

Stimulus over-selectivity is a phenomenon often displayed by individuals with many forms of developmental and intellectual disabilities, and also by individuals lacking such disabilities who are under cognitive strain. It occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and…

Behavioral studies show that infants are capable of discriminating the number of objects or events in their environment, while also suggesting that number discrimination in infancy may be ratio-dependent. However, due to limitations of the dependent measures used with infant behavioral studies, the evidence for ratio dependence falls short of the…

We investigated learning-related changes in amplitude, scalp topography, and source localization of the mismatch negativity (MMN), a neurophysiological response correlated with auditory discrimination ability. Participants (n = 32) underwent two EEG recordings while they watched silent films and ignored auditory stimuli. Stimuli were a standard…