Sensory Motor Loop

University of Washington's Toshiaki Imada and Patricia Kuhlperform a study on Finnish infants using MEG to examine the process of perceiving and producing particulate sounds.

Interesting that this study is conducted over time, applies MEG to infants, and isn't done in English.

Look forward to more studies of the like. Read below for quotes from the article.

"We think the connection between perception and production of speech gets formed by experience, and we are trying to determine when and how babies do it," said Kuhl, who also is a professor of speech and hearing sciences.

The study involved 43 infants in Finland -- 18 newborns, 17 6-month-olds and 8 one-year olds. Special hardware and software developed for this study allowed the infants' brain activity to be monitored even if they moved and captured brain activation with millisecond precision.

The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones -- pure tones that do not resemble speech like notes played on a piano, a three-tone harmonic chord that resembles speech and two Finnish syllables, "pa" and "ta." The researchers collected magnetic data only from the left hemisphere of the brain among the newborns because they cannot sit up and the magnetoencephalography cap was too big to securely fit their heads.

At all three ages the infants showed activation in the temporal part of the brain, Broca's area, that is responsible for listening and understanding speech, showing they were able to detect sound changes for all three stimuli. But the pure perception of sound did not activate the areas of the brain responsible for speaking. However, researchers began seeing some activation in Broca's area when the 6-month-old infants heard the syllables or harmonic chords. By the time the infants were one-year old, the speech stimuli activated Broca's area simultaneously with the auditory areas, indicating "cross-talk" between the area of the brain that hears language and the area that produces language, according to Kuhl.