An international team of researchers, including developmental psychologist Yasuyo Minagawa from Keio University and psycholinguist Jutta Mueller from the University of Vienna, has discovered that newborns are capable of learning complex sound sequences that follow language-like rules. This groundbreaking study provides long-sought evidence that the ability to perceive dependencies between non-adjacent acoustic signals is innate.
It has long been known that babies can learn sequences of syllables or sounds that directly follow one another. However, human language often involves patterns that link elements which are not adjacent. For example, in the sentence "The tall woman who is hiding behind the tree calls herself Catwoman," the subject "The tall woman" is connected to the verb ending "-s," indicating third-person singular. Language development research suggests that children begin to master such rules in their native language by the age of two. However, learning experiments have shown that even infants as young as five months can detect rules between non-adjacent elements, not just in language but in non-linguistic sounds, such as tones. "Even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, can detect complex acoustic patterns when embedded in tones," says co-author Simon Townsend from the University of Zurich.
This research was published on October 22, 2024 (14:00 Eastern Time), in PLOS Biology.
