Prosody as an Entry Point into Language Structure in Early Language Acquisition

The prosody of spoken language is characterized by quasi-rhythmic features, which are perceivable by the fetus already from the third trimester of gestation. Recent research studying infant cognition is increasingly focusing on oscillations as a reliable measure of brain responses to quasi-rhythmic auditory stimuli, such as speech at different levels of granularity. There is indeed increasing evidence for a match between the frequency of neural oscillations and the rates of different linguistic units, such as phonemes, syllables, and phrases, both in adults and children. Here we review recent advances in how neural activity aligns with language input at different levels of language structure and organization, at different developmental stages in the first year of life. Importantly, we discuss how this neural architecture may support the development of grammar.