New research out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that babies know what certain words mean at as soon as 6 months of age, Science News reports.
“Our guess is that a special human desire for social connection, on the part of parents and their infants, is an important component of early word learning,” (graduate student Elika) Bergelson says. The work is published online the week of February 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, 33 infants ages 6 to 9 months and 50 kids ages 10 to 20 months sat on their mothers’ laps in front of a computer connected to an eye-tracking device. Even at 6 months, babies looked substantially longer, on average, at images of various foods and body parts named by their mothers when those items appeared with other objects.
Kids as young as 6 months, for example, looked longer at a picture of hair paired with a picture of a banana when their mothers said “Look at the hair,” relative to time spent looking at a hair image when their mothers said “Look at the banana.” Infants also homed in on the nose on a woman’s face after their mothers said “Do you see the nose?”
Original source: Science News
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