Usha Goswami | University of Cambridge (2024)

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in t... more It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (for example, mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal information (‘visual prosody’) is known from behavioural studies to be perceived by infants, but oscillatory studies are currently lacking. Here we measure cortical tracking of low-frequency visual temporal information by five- and eight-month-old infants using a rhythmic speech paradigm (repetition of the syllable “ta” at 2 Hz). Eye-tracking data was collected simultaneously with EEG, enabling computation of cortical tracking and phase angle during visual-only speech presentation. Significantly higher power at the stimulus frequency indicated that cortical tracking occurred across both ages. Further, individual differences in preferr...

Cortical signals have been shown to track acoustic and linguistic properties of continual speech.... more Cortical signals have been shown to track acoustic and linguistic properties of continual speech. This phenomenon has been measured across the lifespan, reflecting speech understanding as well as cognitive functions such as attention and prediction. Furthermore, atypical low-frequency cortical tracking of speech is found in children with phonological difficulties (developmental dyslexia). Accordingly, low-frequency cortical signals, especially in the delta and theta ranges, may play a critical role in language acquisition. A recent investigation Attaheri et al., 2022 (1) probed cortical tracking mechanisms in infants aged 4, 7 and 11 months as they listened to sung speech. Results from temporal response functions (TRF), phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) and dynamic theta-delta power (PSD) analyses indicated speech envelope tracking and stimulus related power (PSD) via the delta & theta neural signals. Furthermore, delta and theta driven PAC was found at all ages with gamma amplitudes d...

The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spellin... more The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for example perceiving and identifying syllable stress patterns, syllables, rhymes and phonemes. Yet spoken word production appears normal. This suggests an unexpected disconnect between speech input and speech output processes. Here we investigated the output side of this disconnect from a speech rhythm perspective by measuring the speech amplitude envelope (AE) of multisyllabic spoken phrases. The speech AE contains crucial information regarding stress patterns, speech rate, tonal contrasts and intonational information. We created a novel computerized speech copying task in which participants copied aloud familiar spoken targets like “Aladdin”. Seventy-five children with and without dyslexia were tested, some of whom were also receiving an oral intervention d...

Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech envelope, which is percei... more Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech envelope, which is perceived atypically by children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and developmental dyslexia. Here we use electroencephalography (EEG) and natural speech listening paradigms to identify neural processing patterns that characterize dyslexic versus DLD children. Using a story listening paradigm, we show that atypical power dynamics and phase-amplitude coupling between delta and theta oscillations characterize dyslexic and DLD children groups, respectively. We further identify EEG common spatial patterns (CSP) during speech listening across delta, theta and beta oscillations describing dyslexic versus DLD children. A linear classifier using four deltaband CSP variables predicted dyslexia status (0.77 AUC). Crucially, these spatial patterns also identified children with dyslexia in a rhythmic syllable task EEG, suggesting a core developmental deficit in neural processing of speech rhythm...

Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processi... more Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4-6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however to date no cortical tracking study could investigate the emergence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically-invariant phonetic encoding over the first year of life, providing the first direct evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By 11 months of age, however, infants still did...

The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists ... more The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists linguistic decoding. The sensory-neural Temporal Sampling (TS) theory of developmental dyslexia proposes atypical encoding of speech envelope information <10 Hz, leading to atypical phonological representations. Here a backward linear TRF model and story listening were employed to estimate the speech information encoded in the electroencephalogram in the canonical delta, theta and alpha bands by 9-year-old children with and without dyslexia. TRF decoding accuracy provided an estimate of how faithfully the children’s brains encoded low-frequency envelope information. Between-group analyses showed that the children with dyslexia exhibited impaired reconstruction of speech information in the delta band. However, when the quality of speech encoding for each child was estimated using child-by-child decoding models, then the dyslexic children did not differ from controls. This suggests that...

Atypical phase alignment of low-frequency neural oscillations to speech rhythm has been implicate... more Atypical phase alignment of low-frequency neural oscillations to speech rhythm has been implicated in phonological deficits in developmental dyslexia. Atypical phase alignment to rhythm could thus also characterize infants at risk for later language difficulties. Here, we investigate phase-language mechanisms in a neurotypical infant sample. 122 two-, six- and nine-month-old infants were played speech and non-speech rhythms while EEG was recorded in a longitudinal design. The phase of infants’ neural oscillations aligned consistently to the stimuli, with group-level convergence towards a common phase. Individual low-frequency phase alignment related to subsequent measures of language acquisition up to 24 months of age. Accordingly, individual differences in language acquisition are related to the phase alignment of cortical tracking of auditory and audiovisual rhythms in infancy, an automatic neural mechanism. Automatic rhythmic phase-language mechanisms could eventually serve as bi...

PLOS ONE

Statistical learning of physical stimulus characteristics is important for the development of cog... more Statistical learning of physical stimulus characteristics is important for the development of cognitive systems like language and music. Rhythm patterns are a core component of both systems, and rhythm is key to language acquisition by infants. Accordingly, the physical stimulus characteristics that yield speech rhythm in “Babytalk” may also describe the hierarchical rhythmic relationships that characterize human music and song. Computational modelling of the amplitude envelope of “Babytalk” (infant-directed speech, IDS) using a demodulation approach (Spectral-Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy model, S-AMPH) can describe these characteristics. S-AMPH modelling of Babytalk has shown previously that bands of amplitude modulations (AMs) at different temporal rates and their phase relations help to create its structured inherent rhythms. Additionally, S-AMPH modelling of children’s nursery rhymes shows that different rhythm patterns (trochaic, iambic, dactylic) depend on the phase re...

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Oct 17, 2022

The foundations for language acquisition are laid in infancy. A key feature of infant-directed sp... more The foundations for language acquisition are laid in infancy. A key feature of infant-directed speech (IDS) is that the slowest modulations of its amplitude envelope (~2 Hz) contain more energy than in adult-directed speech. These slow modulations may provide a cross-language rhythmic scaffold for the neural tracking of speech in infancy. To investigate relations between early neural processing of speech and language acquisition in English, the BabyRhythm project followed 113 infants during infancy and toddlerhood. The neural predictor of language development reported here was the cortical tracking of slow, rhythmic audiovisual stimuli, processing of which is known to differ in older children with dyslexia. To find out how such stimuli are tracked early in development, infants were presented with videos of a woman repeating the syllable “Ta” twice per second, and a ball bouncing on a drum to create a 2Hz beat. At the ages of six and nine months, infants exhibited a significant peak ...

Developmental Science, 2016

Neuropsychology and Cognition, 2003

In this chapter, I attempt to provide a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of developmen... more In this chapter, I attempt to provide a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of developmental dyslexia in all languages. I will propose that the primary deficit in developmental dyslexia in all languages lies in representing speech sounds, and that this deficit manifests in somewhat different ways depending on orthography. I will suggest that some of the processes underpinning language acquisition are disrupted in dyslexia, and that this leads to deficits in the development of phonological representation before literacy is acquired. This causes characteristic and persistent problems in tasks reliant on the phonological system such as short-term memory and speeded naming, and also causes later literacy problems, as the basic representational system upon which reading builds is subtly deficient. However, consequent literacy problems are greater for dyslexic children learning to read an inconsistent orthography (e.g., English) than a consistent orthography (e.g., Italian, German, Greek). Phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme recoding develops relatively efficiently in the latter groups, who show mainly speed-based literacy problems. Phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme recoding do not develop efficiently in the former groups, who show decrements in both speed and accuracy in diagnostic phonological and literacy tasks.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1986

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1992

... In U, Frith (Ed,), Cognitive Processes in Spelling (pp, 355-370), London: Academic Press, Bry... more ... In U, Frith (Ed,), Cognitive Processes in Spelling (pp, 355-370), London: Academic Press, Bryant, P. E, and Bradley, L, (1985 ... programme for stimulating phonological awareness in pre-school children, Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 163-284, Marsh, G,, Freidman, M, P,, Welch ...

Developmental Science, 2006

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to Developmental Science that advance our underst... more In this paper, I review some recent submissions to Developmental Science that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection, gaze following and gaze monitoring, social referencing and joint attention to emergent psychological understanding. I also consider infant understanding of goal‐directed action, and the intimate connection between language acquisition and psychological development. The centrality of intention‐reading skills to both language and social cognition is highlighted.

Cognitive Development, 2001

There is now a considerable literature demonstrating analogical reasoning in children as young as... more There is now a considerable literature demonstrating analogical reasoning in children as young as 3 and 4 years of age. Here, we used analogy as a sensitive measure of proportional understanding in young children. In two experiments, we examined whether children's performance in a proportional analogy task would be affected when concrete models evoking different kinds of conceptual referents were

Cognitive Development, 1989

Abstract The topic of relational reasoning in children has been the focus of much recent research... more Abstract The topic of relational reasoning in children has been the focus of much recent research, especially in the realm of reasoning by analogy. However, there is a curious discrepancy between the findings in the recent research literature on problem solving by analogy, where young children are very successful, and the large literature on solving classical a:b::c:d analogies, where children are largely unsuccessful until around age 10 years. It is hypothesized that the main reason for this discrepancy is that the relations used in classical analogies are more complex than those used in problem analogies. Two experiments are presented in which children aged 4–7 years were given classical analogies to solve that were based on simple perceptual relations. It was found that by age 6, children were highly successful in solving a:b::c:d analogies of this kind.

Child Development, 1995

GOSWAMI, USHA. Transitive Relational Mappings in Three-and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilo... more GOSWAMI, USHA. Transitive Relational Mappings in Three-and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1995, 66, 877-892. 3 experiments exam-ined the ability of a group of 3-and 4-year-old children to make transitive relational ...

Child Development, 1991

... Additional analyses were run in order to examine whether there was any difference in the numb... more ... Additional analyses were run in order to examine whether there was any difference in the number of analogies made between different kinds of consonant ... Phonolt^cal analysis of the whole letter string at the phonemic level does not seem to play a major role in transfer in ...

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in t... more It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (for example, mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal information (‘visual prosody’) is known from behavioural studies to be perceived by infants, but oscillatory studies are currently lacking. Here we measure cortical tracking of low-frequency visual temporal information by five- and eight-month-old infants using a rhythmic speech paradigm (repetition of the syllable “ta” at 2 Hz). Eye-tracking data was collected simultaneously with EEG, enabling computation of cortical tracking and phase angle during visual-only speech presentation. Significantly higher power at the stimulus frequency indicated that cortical tracking occurred across both ages. Further, individual differences in preferr...

Cortical signals have been shown to track acoustic and linguistic properties of continual speech.... more Cortical signals have been shown to track acoustic and linguistic properties of continual speech. This phenomenon has been measured across the lifespan, reflecting speech understanding as well as cognitive functions such as attention and prediction. Furthermore, atypical low-frequency cortical tracking of speech is found in children with phonological difficulties (developmental dyslexia). Accordingly, low-frequency cortical signals, especially in the delta and theta ranges, may play a critical role in language acquisition. A recent investigation Attaheri et al., 2022 (1) probed cortical tracking mechanisms in infants aged 4, 7 and 11 months as they listened to sung speech. Results from temporal response functions (TRF), phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) and dynamic theta-delta power (PSD) analyses indicated speech envelope tracking and stimulus related power (PSD) via the delta & theta neural signals. Furthermore, delta and theta driven PAC was found at all ages with gamma amplitudes d...

The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spellin... more The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for example perceiving and identifying syllable stress patterns, syllables, rhymes and phonemes. Yet spoken word production appears normal. This suggests an unexpected disconnect between speech input and speech output processes. Here we investigated the output side of this disconnect from a speech rhythm perspective by measuring the speech amplitude envelope (AE) of multisyllabic spoken phrases. The speech AE contains crucial information regarding stress patterns, speech rate, tonal contrasts and intonational information. We created a novel computerized speech copying task in which participants copied aloud familiar spoken targets like “Aladdin”. Seventy-five children with and without dyslexia were tested, some of whom were also receiving an oral intervention d...

Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech envelope, which is percei... more Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech envelope, which is perceived atypically by children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and developmental dyslexia. Here we use electroencephalography (EEG) and natural speech listening paradigms to identify neural processing patterns that characterize dyslexic versus DLD children. Using a story listening paradigm, we show that atypical power dynamics and phase-amplitude coupling between delta and theta oscillations characterize dyslexic and DLD children groups, respectively. We further identify EEG common spatial patterns (CSP) during speech listening across delta, theta and beta oscillations describing dyslexic versus DLD children. A linear classifier using four deltaband CSP variables predicted dyslexia status (0.77 AUC). Crucially, these spatial patterns also identified children with dyslexia in a rhythmic syllable task EEG, suggesting a core developmental deficit in neural processing of speech rhythm...

Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processi... more Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4-6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however to date no cortical tracking study could investigate the emergence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically-invariant phonetic encoding over the first year of life, providing the first direct evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By 11 months of age, however, infants still did...

The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists ... more The amplitude envelope of speech carries crucial low-frequency acoustic information that assists linguistic decoding. The sensory-neural Temporal Sampling (TS) theory of developmental dyslexia proposes atypical encoding of speech envelope information <10 Hz, leading to atypical phonological representations. Here a backward linear TRF model and story listening were employed to estimate the speech information encoded in the electroencephalogram in the canonical delta, theta and alpha bands by 9-year-old children with and without dyslexia. TRF decoding accuracy provided an estimate of how faithfully the children’s brains encoded low-frequency envelope information. Between-group analyses showed that the children with dyslexia exhibited impaired reconstruction of speech information in the delta band. However, when the quality of speech encoding for each child was estimated using child-by-child decoding models, then the dyslexic children did not differ from controls. This suggests that...

Atypical phase alignment of low-frequency neural oscillations to speech rhythm has been implicate... more Atypical phase alignment of low-frequency neural oscillations to speech rhythm has been implicated in phonological deficits in developmental dyslexia. Atypical phase alignment to rhythm could thus also characterize infants at risk for later language difficulties. Here, we investigate phase-language mechanisms in a neurotypical infant sample. 122 two-, six- and nine-month-old infants were played speech and non-speech rhythms while EEG was recorded in a longitudinal design. The phase of infants’ neural oscillations aligned consistently to the stimuli, with group-level convergence towards a common phase. Individual low-frequency phase alignment related to subsequent measures of language acquisition up to 24 months of age. Accordingly, individual differences in language acquisition are related to the phase alignment of cortical tracking of auditory and audiovisual rhythms in infancy, an automatic neural mechanism. Automatic rhythmic phase-language mechanisms could eventually serve as bi...

PLOS ONE

Statistical learning of physical stimulus characteristics is important for the development of cog... more Statistical learning of physical stimulus characteristics is important for the development of cognitive systems like language and music. Rhythm patterns are a core component of both systems, and rhythm is key to language acquisition by infants. Accordingly, the physical stimulus characteristics that yield speech rhythm in “Babytalk” may also describe the hierarchical rhythmic relationships that characterize human music and song. Computational modelling of the amplitude envelope of “Babytalk” (infant-directed speech, IDS) using a demodulation approach (Spectral-Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy model, S-AMPH) can describe these characteristics. S-AMPH modelling of Babytalk has shown previously that bands of amplitude modulations (AMs) at different temporal rates and their phase relations help to create its structured inherent rhythms. Additionally, S-AMPH modelling of children’s nursery rhymes shows that different rhythm patterns (trochaic, iambic, dactylic) depend on the phase re...

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Oct 17, 2022

The foundations for language acquisition are laid in infancy. A key feature of infant-directed sp... more The foundations for language acquisition are laid in infancy. A key feature of infant-directed speech (IDS) is that the slowest modulations of its amplitude envelope (~2 Hz) contain more energy than in adult-directed speech. These slow modulations may provide a cross-language rhythmic scaffold for the neural tracking of speech in infancy. To investigate relations between early neural processing of speech and language acquisition in English, the BabyRhythm project followed 113 infants during infancy and toddlerhood. The neural predictor of language development reported here was the cortical tracking of slow, rhythmic audiovisual stimuli, processing of which is known to differ in older children with dyslexia. To find out how such stimuli are tracked early in development, infants were presented with videos of a woman repeating the syllable “Ta” twice per second, and a ball bouncing on a drum to create a 2Hz beat. At the ages of six and nine months, infants exhibited a significant peak ...

Developmental Science, 2016

Neuropsychology and Cognition, 2003

In this chapter, I attempt to provide a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of developmen... more In this chapter, I attempt to provide a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of developmental dyslexia in all languages. I will propose that the primary deficit in developmental dyslexia in all languages lies in representing speech sounds, and that this deficit manifests in somewhat different ways depending on orthography. I will suggest that some of the processes underpinning language acquisition are disrupted in dyslexia, and that this leads to deficits in the development of phonological representation before literacy is acquired. This causes characteristic and persistent problems in tasks reliant on the phonological system such as short-term memory and speeded naming, and also causes later literacy problems, as the basic representational system upon which reading builds is subtly deficient. However, consequent literacy problems are greater for dyslexic children learning to read an inconsistent orthography (e.g., English) than a consistent orthography (e.g., Italian, German, Greek). Phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme recoding develops relatively efficiently in the latter groups, who show mainly speed-based literacy problems. Phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme recoding do not develop efficiently in the former groups, who show decrements in both speed and accuracy in diagnostic phonological and literacy tasks.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1986

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1992

... In U, Frith (Ed,), Cognitive Processes in Spelling (pp, 355-370), London: Academic Press, Bry... more ... In U, Frith (Ed,), Cognitive Processes in Spelling (pp, 355-370), London: Academic Press, Bryant, P. E, and Bradley, L, (1985 ... programme for stimulating phonological awareness in pre-school children, Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 163-284, Marsh, G,, Freidman, M, P,, Welch ...

Developmental Science, 2006

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to Developmental Science that advance our underst... more In this paper, I review some recent submissions to Developmental Science that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection, gaze following and gaze monitoring, social referencing and joint attention to emergent psychological understanding. I also consider infant understanding of goal‐directed action, and the intimate connection between language acquisition and psychological development. The centrality of intention‐reading skills to both language and social cognition is highlighted.

Cognitive Development, 2001

There is now a considerable literature demonstrating analogical reasoning in children as young as... more There is now a considerable literature demonstrating analogical reasoning in children as young as 3 and 4 years of age. Here, we used analogy as a sensitive measure of proportional understanding in young children. In two experiments, we examined whether children's performance in a proportional analogy task would be affected when concrete models evoking different kinds of conceptual referents were

Cognitive Development, 1989

Abstract The topic of relational reasoning in children has been the focus of much recent research... more Abstract The topic of relational reasoning in children has been the focus of much recent research, especially in the realm of reasoning by analogy. However, there is a curious discrepancy between the findings in the recent research literature on problem solving by analogy, where young children are very successful, and the large literature on solving classical a:b::c:d analogies, where children are largely unsuccessful until around age 10 years. It is hypothesized that the main reason for this discrepancy is that the relations used in classical analogies are more complex than those used in problem analogies. Two experiments are presented in which children aged 4–7 years were given classical analogies to solve that were based on simple perceptual relations. It was found that by age 6, children were highly successful in solving a:b::c:d analogies of this kind.

Child Development, 1995

GOSWAMI, USHA. Transitive Relational Mappings in Three-and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilo... more GOSWAMI, USHA. Transitive Relational Mappings in Three-and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1995, 66, 877-892. 3 experiments exam-ined the ability of a group of 3-and 4-year-old children to make transitive relational ...

Child Development, 1991

... Additional analyses were run in order to examine whether there was any difference in the numb... more ... Additional analyses were run in order to examine whether there was any difference in the number of analogies made between different kinds of consonant ... Phonolt^cal analysis of the whole letter string at the phonemic level does not seem to play a major role in transfer in ...