BASIS

Infants produce little spoken language by their first year of life, but they already recognize many familiar words. This raises the intriguing question whether infants’ first words may occur silently in their minds before they begin to talk. Investigating whether infants engage in such “silent practice” of language could transform current theories of early cognition and language acquisition. 

The BASIS project targets an unexplored area of language development: whether infants possess inner speech and when it may begin to operate. To date, no research has investigated the inner speech in children younger than 5 years. BASIS will trace inner speech’s developmental precursors in infants (6 to 24 months) with three research lines: Articulatory “readiness” , Mental lexicon and Manipulation and Storage of multi-word utterances. BASIS will overcome methodological constraints by measuring inner speech through brain-to-speech synchrony, indexed via pupillary responses. This approach will provide access to internal linguistic knowledge that precedes what can be observed through overt speech.