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Active Auditory Experience In Infancy Promotes Brain Plasticity In Theta And Gamma Oscillations, Gabriella Musacchia, Silvia Ortiz-Mantilla, Naseem Choudhury, Teresa Realpe-Bonilla, Cynthia P. Roesler, April A. Benasich

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Language acquisition in infants is driven by on-going neural plasticity that is acutely sensitive to environmental acoustic cues. Recent studies showed that attention-based experience with non-linguistic, temporally-modulated auditory stimuli sharpens cortical responses. A previous ERP study from this laboratory showed that interactive auditory experience via behavior-based feedback (AEx), over a 6-week period from 4- to 7-months-of-age, confers a processing advantage, compared to passive auditory exposure (PEx) or maturation alone (Naïve Control, NC). Here, we provide a follow-up investigation of the underlying neural oscillatory patterns in these three groups. In AEx infants, Standard stimuli with invariant frequency (STD) elicited greater Theta-band …