Your brain uses the first and last syllables in order to recognize words, and now researchers from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy have found that this mechanism is even present in newborn children.
Writing in the journal Developmental Science, the SISSA researchers and colleagues from Udine Hospital found that infants are already capable of processing language as early as two days after being born. The research showed that two day old newborns were already sensitive to the most important parts of spoken words.
The team claimed in a statement that this emphasis on the “edges of words” has been observed in older children and adults, as those individuals are better able to remember the edges of linguistic sequences when they have to recall and recognize specific words. This is due to the fact that the brain places more value on information at the edges, they added.
Lead author and SISSA researcher Alissa Ferry stated, “The syllables at the beginnings and the ends of words often carry important information. For example, the parts of words that contain information about plurality of objects or verb tense are almost always found at the beginning or at the end of words in all known languages.”
Infant brains responded to subtle changes to edge syllables
Ana Flo, a researcher involved in the study, explained that this is “a pervasive phenomenon” and that her team’s findings indicate that it is present in humans at birth. This study builds on previous research conducted at SISSA, which discovered that the encoding ability existed in pre-linguistic babies between the ages of seven and eight months.
Study author and SISSA researcher Perrine Brusini explained the test: “The infants heard a sequence of six syllables and we examined if they could discriminate it from a very similar sequence in which we switched the positions of two of the syllables.
When we switched the edge syllables, the newborns’ brain responded to the change, but when we switched the two syllables in the middle, they did not respond to the change.”
This observation suggests that the newborns were better at encoding the syllables at the edges of the sequence than the parts in the middle, the researchers said. In another series of experiments, the authors added a break in continuity and sequence between the two middle syllables to see if the newborns would react.
According to Flo, they introduced a nearly imperceptible 25-millisecond pause between the syllables and found that the infants’ brains treated the syllables as if they were two separate and distinct, smaller words, responding accordingly when the syllables changed. The authors concluded that this shows that the cognitive mechanisms that make it so that humans better encode information at the edges of words are present even in newborn children.
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