KNOWN VERSUS UNKNOWN WORD DISCRIMINATIONS IN 12-MONTH-OLD HUMAN INFANTS - ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL CORRELATES

Studies of brain-language relations have focused almost exclusively on adults and, to a lesser extent, young children. Little, however, is k nown about the brain's involvement in language during the earliest sta ges of language acquisition, the focus of this study. Parents identifi ed from a set of 10 words those that they believed were understood by their infant and those that were not known. Auditory event-related pot entials (ERPs) were then recorded from the frontal, temporal, and pari etal scalp regions of the infants while they listened to this series o f known and unknown words. The brain responses reliably discriminated between two sets of stimuli-words that were known to the infants and w ords that were unknown. Results resemble findings previously reported for older infants. These data extend the use of auditory ERPs in the s tudy of early word meaning to 12-month-old infants and indicate marked similarities in responding between this age group and older infants.