Revealing the child's first voice secret

A new study can explain why 'three', 'mother' are often the first words that children speak. Perhaps the human brain has been programmed to recognize certain repeated patterns.

Using the most advanced optical brain imaging techniques, postdoctoral researcher Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, along with a team of Italian and Chilean researchers, recorded brain activity of 22 children. newborns (2-3 days old) when they are exposed to the recordings of fictional words.

Scientists have put words that end with repeating sounds, such as 'mubaba' or 'penana', with words that do not have repeated sounds such as 'mubage' or 'penaku '. They found that brain activity was enhanced in the infant's forehead and temples whenever they turned on the repeating tape. Words with repeated but not adjacent syllables (like 'bamuba' or 'napena') do not produce such reactions in the brain.

A new study can explain why 'three', 'mother' are often the first words that children speak. Perhaps the human brain has been programmed to recognize certain repeated patterns. (Photo: iStockphoto / Aldo Murillo)

Gervan of the Center for Child Research, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia said: 'Perhaps there is no coincidence that many languages ​​in the world have words that bring repeat syllables in' the voice of children '- like' baby 'and' daddy '(father) in English,' papa '(father) in Italian and' tata '(he) in Hungarian'.

Scientists have also studied how older children and adults can learn grammatical structures. This is one of the first studies of innate ability to decipher the types of structures in newborn language . Gervain said: 'The language center in most right-handed adults is in the left brain. This fits perfectly with our findings in newborns and reinforces our belief that human innate ability helps us comprehend and learn mother tongue systematically and effectively. fruit'.

'The areas of the brain responsible for adults in adults do not learn how to handle language during development, but they are specific to each language to process language right from the beginning.'

The study is published on the online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.