Rapid learning of new words is crucial for language acquisition, and frequent exposure to spoken words enables vocabulary development.<\/p>\n In her doctoral dissertation, Lilli Kimppa studied neural response dynamics to new words over brief exposure. She measured the neural activation of Finnish-speaking volunteers with electroencephalography (EEG) during auditory tasks in which existing Finnish words, and non-words with Finnish and non-native phonology, were repeated.<\/p>\n “Unlike to existing words, new words showed a neural response enhancement between the early and late stages of exposure on the left frontal and temporal cortices, which was interpreted as the build-up of neural memory circuits. The magnitude of this neural enhancement also correlated with how well the participants remembered the new words afterwards,” Kimppa says.<\/p>\n To examine the effect of attention, the words were presented for ~30 minutes in two conditions: participants were either passively exposed to the spoken words on the background, or they attended to the speech. Similar neural enhancement to novel words was observed in both listening conditions.<\/p>\n Kimppa also investigated how participants’ language background influenced the word memory-trace formation.<\/p>\n She noticed that the response enhancement to new non-native words was larger in participants who had learned more foreign languages with earlier learning onset<\/strong>, implying greater flexibility of the brain to acquire speech with novel phonology.<\/p>\n Conversely, later onset of foreign language learning was associated with stronger neural increase to new words with Finnish phonology.<\/p>\n “Their brain had apparently become more tuned to the native language,” Kimppa states.<\/p>\n In her doctoral dissertation, Kimppa also studied rapid neural word learning among 9-12 year-old dyslexic and normally reading children.<\/p>\n “Control children exhibited a response increase to a novel word within the first 6 minutes of passive perceptual exposure. Children with dyslexia, however, did not show such neural enhancement during the entire 11-minute session. This suggests deficient rapid word learning abilities of the brain in dyslexia compared to non-affected peers. Dyslexics possibly need even more repetition or different kinds of learning strategies to show the neural effect,” Kimppa says.<\/p>\n The dissertation is available online in this website: https:\/\/helda.helsinki.fi\/handle\/10138\/178917<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of Helsinki press release: Lilli Kimppa from the University of Helsinki studied language acquisition in the brain. Even short repetitive exposure to novel words induced a rapid… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,6],"tags":[42,25,65,93],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20910,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20871\/revisions\/20910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Languages2.jpg\")
Lilli Kimppa from the University of Helsinki studied language acquisition<\/strong> in the brain. Even short repetitive exposure to novel words induced a rapid neural response increase that is suggested to manifest memory-trace formation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n