All of us take babies as infants, that is, who are unable to speak or who cannot express themselves. But, to everybody’s surprise babies might seem a bit dim in their first six months of life, and as they grow up, infants can pick out their native tongues from foreign ones. They have the ability to intercept facial expressions that adults do not possess.
Researchers put forward a study of the infants that sounds quite surprising.
Once babies are 4 or 5 months old, they can lip-read, matching faces on silent videos to “ee” and “ah” sounds which older people or adults cannot because this ability disappears by the age of 8 months.
Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages on Earth, and they can hear the difference between sounds in foreign languages that elude most adults.
To everybody’s surprise, in their first six months, infants can differiate between two monkey faces that even an older person would say are identical.
Every child likes to recite poems because kids are rhythm experts, capable of differentiating between the beats of their culture and another.
In fact, all these skills decline once the infants pass the 6-month mark and learn to ignore information that bears little on their immediate environment.
In everything that we do in our research, babies seem to come out with these amazing capabilities. As young infants, they come set with abilities to make a lot of fine discriminations, and they continue to astound us,
said Whitney M. Weikum, a student at the University of British Columbia.
Weikum’s research adds to growing evidence deciphering how infants move from being “universal perceivers,” capable of learning any of the world’s languages, to being experts in the sounds, meanings and composition of their own indigenous language over the first year of life.
George Hollich,a psychologist of Purdue University ,states that babies start to understand grammar by the age of 15 months, processing grammar and words simultaneously. While talking to LiveScience, Hollich says,
Newborns can be said to be ‘intelligent’ in that they have the ability to almost effortlessly learn any of the world’s languages. We scientists consider infants more intelligent when they begin to notice and respond to familiar things. Of course, figuring out how exactly to best respond to familiar sights and sounds is something children will spend the rest of their lives learning to do, and that is the hallmark of what most would consider true ‘intelligence.’
Via:Foxnews
