Babies pick up complex grammar rules at 4 months, study shows

'The present data demonstrate that 4-month-old infants can extract dependencies between non-adjacent elements in sentences from brief exposure to a natural, non-native language,' the researchers conclude. 'The emergence of the sensitivity to the grammatical regularities indicates that infants extracted the dependencies within the two pairs of non-adjacent elements (i.e. the auxiliaries and the respective verb suffixes) from correct sentences they had heard during the training phases.'

'Naturally, at this age infants do not notice content-related errors,' said Professor Friederici. 'Long before they comprehend meaning, babies recognise and generalise regularities from the sound of language.'

According to the researchers, the brain activity patterns of the 4-month old German babies when exposed to errors looked more like those of adult native Italian speakers. Native German speakers who were learning Italian as a second language did not respond in the same way. According to the researchers, '[this] suggests that native learning may be restricted to a sensitive time window during development.'

http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=NEWSLINK_EN_C&RCN=33234&ACTION=D