@article{TelkemeyerRossiNierhausetal.2011,
  author    = {Telkemeyer, Silke and Rossi, Sonja and Nierhaus, Till and Steinbrink, Jens and Obrig, Hellmuth and Wartenburger, Isabell},
  title     = {Acoustic processing of temporally modulated sounds in infants evidence from a combined near-infrared spectroscopy and EEG study},
  series = {Frontiers in psychology},
  volume    = {2},
  journal   = {Frontiers in psychology},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation},
  address   = {Lausanne},
  issn      = {1664-1078},
  doi       = {10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00062},
  pages     = {14},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{OttHoehle2011,
  author    = {Ott, Susan and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition},
  series = {Journal of child language},
  volume    = {40},
  journal   = {Journal of child language},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0305-0009},
  doi       = {10.1017/S030500091200027X},
  pages     = {169 -- 192},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3rd person singular with - t suffix) with either high-or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1-5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0-3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA-or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.},
  language  = {en}
}