Thursday, June 07, 2007

Grammar for Babies

Don't laugh: Babies apparently prefer grammar to grunting...

The roots of grammar:
New study shows children innately prepared to learn language

To learn a language, a child must learn a set of all-purpose rules, such as “a sentence can be formed by combining a subject, a verb and an object” that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules – and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech.

In a series of experiments appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Gary Marcus and co-authors Keith Fernandes and Scott Johnson at New York University exposed infants to abstractly structured sequences that consisted of either speech syllables or nonspeech sounds.

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And we know just what babies should wear when practicing their parts of speech:

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