Babies Can Understand What You’re Saying At 6 Months Old. F**k. S**t.
I often fret about the various dangers of me bringing a baby into the world. (There’s a lot of possible positive attributes, but I have no self-esteem.) One of the is my salty language. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I enjoy swearing. A smidge. A new study shows that babies have a grasp of what we’re saying way earlier than I would have expected.
io9:
Babies are easy to underestimate. This is understandable; after all, when most of us interact with an infant, we see a clumsy, messy creature – one more adept at stringing together strange gurgling noises than distinct consonants and vowels.
And yet, evidence continues to accumulate that just because an infant can’t speak, doesn’t mean it can’t grasp what’s being said in its presence. In fact, new research suggests that babies may be capable of understanding many common nouns months earlier than we once thought possible.
There is a significant distinction between understanding the elements of sound that comprise a language, and comprehending the meaning of a word itself.
“It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds,” explain psychologists Elika Bergelson and Daniel Swingley in the latest issue ofProceedings of the National Academy of Science.
“Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 months of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others’ goals and intentions.”
Read more.
As someone who is interested in education and human development (I can’t think of a way to make that sound unpretentious but I think we all know me here), I often am amazed by babies. They’re little info-machines, absorbing structures and making sense of the world. Just taking it all fucking in, man. This newest finding is just another example. Our brains are fucking radical.