AUTHOR=Ortiz-Barajas Maria Clemencia 

TITLE=Predicting language outcome at birth

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 18 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1370572

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2024.1370572

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=Even though most children acquire language effortlessly, not all do. Nowadays, language disorders are difficult to diagnose before 3-4 years of age, because diagnosis relies on behavioural criteria difficult to obtain early in life. Using electroencephalography, I investigated whether differences in newborns' neural activity when listening to sentences in their native language (French) and a rhythmically different unfamiliar language (English) relate to measures of later language development at 12 and 18 months. Here I show that activation differences in the theta band at birth predict language comprehension abilities at 12 and 18 months. These findings suggest that a neural measure of language discrimination at birth could be used in the early identification of infants at risk of developmental language disorders.