Learning enhancement | Perception | Warnke method

Summary: It’s a question most new parents ponder, can a newborn baby discriminate between speech sounds? Researchers found newborn babies encode voice pitch comparable to adults exposed to a new language for three years. However, there are some differences when it comes to distinguishing between spectral and temporal fine structures of certain sounds.

Source: University of Barcelona

People’s ability to perceive speech sounds has been deeply studied, specifically during someone’s first year of life. But what happens during the first hours after birth? Are babies born with innate abilities to perceive speech sounds, or do neural encoding processes need to age for some time?

Summary: Using HD-TACS brain stimulation, researchers influenced the integration of speech sounds by changing the balancing processes between the two brain hemispheres.

Source: Max Planck Institute

When we listen to speech sounds, the information that enters our left and right ear is not exactly the same. This may be because acoustic information reaches one ear before the other, or because the sound is perceived as louder by one of the ears. Information about speech sounds also reaches different parts of our brain, and the two hemispheres are specialised in processing different types of acoustic information. But how does the brain integrate auditory information from different areas?