Severe respiratory disease caused by human respiratory syncytial virus impairs language learning during early infancy

Human respiratory syncytial virus infection is a leading cause of pediatric morbidity and mortality. A previous murine study showed that during severe acute respiratory infections the virus invades the central nervous system, and that infected animals evolve with long-lasting learning difficulties associated with long-term potentiation impairment in their hippocampus. We hypothesized here that human infants who presented a severe episode of respiratory syncytial virus infection before 6 months of age would develop long-term learning difficulties. We measured the acquisition of the native phoneme repertoire during the first year, a milestone in early human development, comprising a reduction in the sensitivity to the irrelevant nonnative phonetic information and an increase in the sensitivity to the information relevant for the native one. We found that infants with a history of severe respiratory infection by the human respiratory syncytial virus presented poor distinction of native and nonnative phonetic contrasts at 6 months of age, and remained atypically sensitive to nonnative contrasts at 12 months, which associated with weak communicative abilities. Our results uncover previously unknown long-term language learning difficulties associated with a single episode of severe respiratory infection by the human respiratory syncytial virus, which could relate to memory impairments.