Here’s all that you need to know about babies and their learning abilities
For the first few years of a baby’s life, everything in the world is new. Learning is a 24/7 process. They have to figure out how to move their bodies, how to manipulate objects, how to understand and use language, and more. It’s an understandably exhausting process. Here are a few things you might not know about what’s going on in the learning infant’s mind:
They start learning in the womb
The parts of a baby’s brain that process sound start working during the third trimester of pregnancy, and it can remember what it hears in the womb after it’s born. For instance, one study found that Swedish infants, only 30 hours old, could differentiate between Swedish vowel sounds and the unfamiliar vowel sounds of foreign languages. Another found that when expectant mothers listened to a soundtrack with a made-up word, the infants recognised that word and its variants after birth.
They start processing language like adults at two days old
At just a few days old, infants use language processing skills similar to those adults use. People remember the beginning and ending syllables of a word more clearly, and listen for those semantic edges more carefully, since they often contain things like verb tenses and information about whether a noun is plural or singular. A 2015 study finds that long before they can talk — within two days of birth — infants are already using this trick, and can distinguish even when there’s a 25 millisecond pause between syllables.
Moving their mouths helps them listen
Infants need to move their tongues to distinguish between sounds, according to a study of 6-month-old infants. Psychologists and audiologists found that when a pacifier prevented babies from moving their tongues, they were not able to distinguish between two novel “d” sounds.
Imitation is key
When babies watch an adult use a specific body part, their brains light up in the areas that correspond with that particular movement. A study of 14-month-old infants found that watching an adult touch a toy with her hand or foot activated the same regions in the infants’ brains associated with moving a hand or a foot. This neural empathy might help babies learn to imitate adults.
Touch helps understand words A 2014 study from Purdue University found that infants relate touches to the sounds they hear at the same time. Every time the experimenters said the nonsense word “dobita,” they touched the infant’s knee. Later on, the infant was touched on the elbow at the sound of another nonsense word, “lepoga.” In a subsequent language study, the infants pulled the word “dobita” out of a stream of words, suggesting that the consistent touch helped them learn it.
Surprise is key Infants learn best when they’re surprised, a recent study found. When an object behaved in an unusual way — like a ball that appears to pass through a wall — 11-month-old babies paid more attention to it, and chose to explore it more. They handled the ball and tried to test its solidity, learning more about the world in the process. When the ball behaved in predictable ways, they didn’t focus on it or try to learn more. They learn music very early Before a child learns to understand language, talking sounds a lot like music — it’s repetitive and rhythmic. “So while music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults,” as psychologists write in a 2012 review in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, “We suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child’s view.” The authors suggest that a child’s understanding of music parallels its initial acquisition of language, and merits a central place in our understanding of human development.
