Watch out! Babies understand much more than previously thought
Do you babble, squeal and squeak? and do not understand what we say to them? Not correct! Even very small children who can not speak yet have an understanding of certain words and phrases. That's what researchers from the US found out in a study? and refutes the hitherto widespread assumption that babies can not yet decode the meaning of spoken words.
Babies recognize "car" and "stroller" are more similar than "car" and "juice"
For their research, researchers from Duke University, North Carolina used eye-tracking software, a program that tracks the baby's eye movements. To judge they showed infants pairs of images of more or less similar motives? about hand and foot or foot and milk carton. An adult who could not see the motives then named one of the two terms by name. The eye-tracking device tracked where the baby's gaze wandered.
Result: Even children between the ages of six and nine months realize that some words are more similar than others. Thus, the baby's gaze rested longer on the respectively named motifs or the images similar to those on the other. Even a few months old children suspected that "car" and "stroller" are more similar than "car" and "juice", so the study.
"Language develops below the surface"
"They may not know the full-fledged adult meaning of a word, but they seem to recognize that the meaning of these words is somewhat more similar than these words," Elika Bergelson, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, comments. In a follow-up phase to the lab tests, she and her team accompanied children and parents home. There, they recorded what adults talked about and later compared the contents to the children's understanding.
Again, it turned out: The babies understood what the parents talked about? at least when they could relate objects and words. A held-up and named as such pen thus remains in Babys memory; the sentence "Tomorrow we go to the zoo!" however, an infant can not yet classify.
It is too early to draw concrete conclusions as to how exactly babies organize knowledge and learned language, according to the researchers. But: "Although babies do not have many obvious signals of language knowledge, the language definitely evolves wildly beneath the surface," says Prof. Bergelson.
So maybe we should at least keep these results in mind when we talk at home in the future? Care, scion hears?
