Brain and language specialist Eylem Altuntas told us last week at Real Clear Science that “Babies Learn Language Much Earlier Than We Thought”:

By their first birthday, babies are already fine-tuning their ears to the sounds of their native language in a process called perceptual attunement. Think of it like their brain sorting through a buffet of sounds to focus on the ones that matter most. But in their first six months, babies can tell apart sounds from languages they’ve never even heard. For example, they might distinguish certain Hindi contrasts that are challenging for adult English speakers or identify unique tones in Mandarin, even if they’re growing up in an English-speaking household. 

January 30, 2025

Although perhaps surprising to many, this is not a unique find, as stories from 2023 and 2024 respectively show.

But the current researchers, Eylem Altuntas, Catherine T. Best, Marina Kalashnikova, Antonia Götz, and Denis Burnham, did an experiment:

To demonstrate this, we conducted an experiment with 34 babies, aged four to six months, whose parents had provided consent to participate. We created a “match-the-pattern” game using two made up mini-languages.

One language had words with lip sounds like “b” and “v”, while the other used tongue-tip sounds like “d” and “z”. Each word, like “bivawo” or “dizalo”, was paired with a cartoon image — a jellyfish for lip words and a crab for tongue-tip words. A recording of a word was played at the same time its paired image was shown.

Why cartoons? Because babies can’t exactly tell us what they’re thinking, but they can form associations in their brains. These images helped us see if the babies could link each mini-language to the correct picture.

After the babies learned these mini-languages and their picture pairings, we mixed things up.

Instead of hearing the words, they watched silent videos of a person’s face saying new words from the same mini-languages.

In some videos, the face matched the cartoon they had learned earlier. In others, it didn’t. We then tracked how long the babies looked at the videos — a common method researchers use to see what grabs their attention. Babies tend to look longer at things that surprise or interest them and shorter at things they find familiar, helping us understand how they process and recognise what they see.

The results were clear: babies looked significantly longer at the videos where the face matched what they’d learned. This showed they weren’t just passively listening earlier – they were actively learning the rules of the mini-languages and linking that knowledge to what they saw.

January 30, 2025

It makes sense. The speed with which children learn to speak without anything like adult comprehension skills points to a pre-adaptation to learn language. The paper, published in Developmental Science, is open access.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.