About this Research Topic
Infants have astonishingly sophisticated abilities to process speech and music. It is, as if many of the higher-order capabilities, such as regularity detection, auditory stream segregation, statistical learning, and rhythm processing are already present at birth or develop quite early during infancy, while some “simple” abilities, such as feature discrimination show a much longer developmental trajectory. These higher-order abilities also provide the basis of further cognitive, emotional, and social development, as they form the basis for communicating and thus learning from caretakers and peers. Therefore, understanding the underlying processes is a prime goal of developmental psychology and neuroscience, and it is also essential for creating early interventions for atypically developing infants, such as designing training protocols for infants at risk of auditory developmental deficits.
Speech and music perception is deeply rooted in sound processing, involving all levels from simple sensory discrimination to discovering and learning higher-order rules, and it has close links to motor functions (such as in dancing) and sound production (both by vocalization and the use of objects/instrument to produce sounds).
The goal of the current Research Topic is to show the state of the art in theoretical thinking and empirical work on understanding the auditory, cognitive, and motor processes together with their genetic and neural bases, which allow infants to learn how to process, interpret, and react to speech and music. The advent of genetic and brain imaging methods as well as novel techniques for analyzing these measures have provided new opportunities to ask specific questions about these processes and to determine their genetic and neural background. This is reflected in the growing number of relevant empirical publications on this subject. By pulling together the latest advances in the field, we not only hope to help researchers to assess studies that have been recently conducted, but also to provide new syntheses of this rapidly expanding database.
We solicit manuscripts describing new empirical work, summarizing current knowledge, or proposing new theoretical views on understanding auditory processes and their neural bases allowing quick development of language acquisition and music perception in infancy and/or on early intervention methods aiming to improve these processes. Papers using neuroscientific, genetic, or psychological approaches are all welcome. While we focus on studies on typically or atypically developing human infants (age 3 years or younger), studies describing older age groups are accepted if their results are related to data from younger infants. Work in animals is accepted when it is clearly related to the development of sound processing in humans.
Speech and music perception is deeply rooted in sound processing, involving all levels from simple sensory discrimination to discovering and learning higher-order rules, and it has close links to motor functions (such as in dancing) and sound production (both by vocalization and the use of objects/instrument to produce sounds).
The goal of the current Research Topic is to show the state of the art in theoretical thinking and empirical work on understanding the auditory, cognitive, and motor processes together with their genetic and neural bases, which allow infants to learn how to process, interpret, and react to speech and music. The advent of genetic and brain imaging methods as well as novel techniques for analyzing these measures have provided new opportunities to ask specific questions about these processes and to determine their genetic and neural background. This is reflected in the growing number of relevant empirical publications on this subject. By pulling together the latest advances in the field, we not only hope to help researchers to assess studies that have been recently conducted, but also to provide new syntheses of this rapidly expanding database.
We solicit manuscripts describing new empirical work, summarizing current knowledge, or proposing new theoretical views on understanding auditory processes and their neural bases allowing quick development of language acquisition and music perception in infancy and/or on early intervention methods aiming to improve these processes. Papers using neuroscientific, genetic, or psychological approaches are all welcome. While we focus on studies on typically or atypically developing human infants (age 3 years or younger), studies describing older age groups are accepted if their results are related to data from younger infants. Work in animals is accepted when it is clearly related to the development of sound processing in humans.
Keywords: auditory processing, infants, development, speech perception, music perception, cognition, brain imaging
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
