A new European research reveals that infants are able to identify as early as four months, some foreign language grammar rules. The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, greatly improves the understanding of language learning in infants.
Children pick up languages at a speed and apparent ease with which a jaw-dropping both their parents and researchers. Studies with infants suggest that even infants are able to differentiate the various phonemes of the syllables. In addition, babies born to very young children seem able to recognize relationships between adjacent syllables tend to occur together.
However, often there are elements that are often linked grammatically but do not appear together in a phrase, for example, in the phrase "is singing", the word "is" is separated from the ending "-ing" the root "to sing ".
"Learning these nonadjacent dependencies is much more difficult than learning to adjacent units," write the researchers.
In fact, previous studies indicated the possibility that children do not understand this kind of rules until the age of 17 or 18 months.
"It seemed too late," said Professor Angela Friederici, Director, Department of Neuropsychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.
ITALIAN AND GERMAN
In this study, Professor Friederici and colleagues sought to determine whether infants of four months could identify these units are not adjacent.
Chose the age of four months because studies suggest that babies of that age already had some phonological discrimination abilities and some degree of verbal memory.
The researchers began teaching German babies four months some basics of Italian.
In just over three minutes, the infants heard sentences in Italian containing two simple constructions. One type of sentence construction including "sta X-ing" '(as is X-ing "), an example of such a sentence is" [il fratello] his singing, "which means" [the brother] is singing ".
The second type of sentence construction including "può X-are" '(such as "may X"), in this case, we can mention the example "[The sorella] può cantare" which means "[the sister] can sing" .
After listening to Italian phrases of this kind, properly trained for three minutes, the children underwent a brief trial, during which he listened to both correct and incorrect sentences. Incorrect phrases mixed constructions, forming phrases like "the singing può sorella" ("The sister can sing") or "il fratello sta sing" ("the brother is singing").
In total, the children went through four phases of learning during which they heard a total of 256 correct sentences, the total learning time was just over 13 minutes.
During the experiment, we measured the brain activity of babies. In the early stages of testing, only perceived differences in the pattern of activity recorded when the babies heard Italian phrases wrong.
However, in the fourth phase of testing, there were different patterns of activity indicating that the children had learned that "sta" should go with "-ing" and "può" with "-are."
"Current data show that children of four months can identify dependencies between adjacent elements in sentences after a brief exposure to a native language is not natural," the researchers conclude.
"The emergence of sensitivity to the grammatical regularities indicates that children identified dependencies between the two pairs of adjacent elements (ie, auxiliary verbs and verb suffixes for) the correct sentences they had heard during the training phase ".
"Clearly, the children of this age do not detect errors related to the content," says Professor Friederici. "Long before they understand the meaning, and generalize regularities babies recognize the sound of language."
According to investigators, the patterns of brain activity of German babies four months when exposed to errors were more like the masters of Italian-speaking adults. Native German speakers who were studying Italian as a second language did not respond the same way.
According to the researchers, this "suggests that learning can natively limited to certain.
