Babies Master Grammar Before their First Word!
Written By Savvy Auntie Staff Writers
Science Daily
March 19, 2020
Even before uttering their first words, our baby nieces and nephews babies are mastering the grammar basics of their mother tongue.
Experiments conducted by three researchers from the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (
CNRS/Université de Paris) discovered that event eight-month-old infants can distinguish function words, or functors -- e.g. articles (the), personal pronouns (she), or prepositions (on) -- from content words -- e.g. nouns (rainbow), verbs (to drive), or adjectives (green). Functors are frequently encountered because there are fewer of them, and they are placed before content words in languages such as English and French.
In contrast, there is a much greater diversity of content words, which are also longer. With a study of 175 eight-month-old babies using a simple artificial language, researchers found that these infants understood functors more frequently and before content words in their mother tongue (French).
The young participants quickly adapted to new content words but showed little interest for newly introduced functors -- as though already aware there were only a limited number of prepositions, determiners, and other words in this category. Babies' preferences were evaluated by observing how long they looked at visual displays associated with the grammar words. This study appears in Current Biology, 12 March 2020.
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