Surely you heard (or said) about: "Well, my baby's first word was dador momor gaga or Dadaist"... or something that at least seemed a lot. They are not very original, but it is also Very similar words are the ones that babies from all over the world pronounce for the first time.
That is why a team of researchers has considered whether the first words of babies contain certain universal features. In their study, they pretend to discover why "dad" and "mom" in Spanish, "daddy" and "mommy" in English, and other words of similar structures in other languages, are often the first words of a baby.
The answer would be that the human brain could be naturally prepared to recognize certain syllable repeating patterns in the words
The curious study has been conducted by a team of researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy, who using brain imaging techniques documented the brain activities of 22 newborns (2 to 3 days old) when exposed to recordings of fictitious words.
AdvertisingBabies reacted with an increase in brain activity to words ending in repeated syllables ("mubaba", "penana" ...) while such reaction did not occur with words without equal syllables ("mubage", "penaku") or with equal syllables not contiguous ("bamuba" and "napena").
Therefore it is likely it is not accidental that the "words for children" contain repeated syllables in different languages: dad and mom in Spanish; daddy, mommy, and baby, in English; Pope in Italian and Tata (grandfather) in Hungarian ...
This study has just been published. on-line in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" with the title of "The neonate brain detects speech structure" ("The brain of the newborn detects discursive structures").
It is important because it becomes one of the first that approaches the innate ability of newborns to decipher structural patterns in language, showing us that they are already born with the ability to perceive and learn the mother tongue systematically and efficiently.
The conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that the areas of the brain that are responsible for language in an adult do not "learn" how to process it during development, but since we are born they are specialized, at least in part.
