The human infant brain: A neural architecture able to learn language

To understand the type of neural computations that may explain how human infants acquire their native language in only a few months, the study of their neural architecture is necessary. The development of brain imaging techniques has opened the possibilities of studying human infants without discomfort, and although these studies are still sparse, several characteristics are noticeable in the human infant’s brain: first, parallel and hierarchical processing pathways are observed before intense exposure to speech with an efficient temporal coding in the left hemisphere and, second, frontal regions are involved from the start in infants’ cognition. These observations are certainly not sufficient to explain language acquisition but illustrate a new approach that relies on a better description of infants’ brain activity during linguistic tasks, which is compared to results in animals and human adults to clarify the neural bases of language in humans.