Human speech's surprising influence on young infants

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/nu-hss010515.php

Public Release: 5-Jan-2015
Northwestern University

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In the article, Waxman and Vouloumanos open with a synopsis of classic research on infants' responses to human speech, but then take a step forward, bringing together a series of new findings that reveal that listening to speech promotes much more than language-learning alone.

Specifically, when it comes to noticing patterns or regularities among the sounds or objects that surround them, recognizing partners with whom they can communicate, and establishing coherent categories of objects and events, infants listening to human speech are more successful than their peers listening to other interesting sounds like tone sequences.

"These new results, culled from several different labs including our own, tell us that infants as young as 2 or 3 months of age not only love to listen to speech, but that they learn about fundamental cognitive and social relations better in the context of listening to speech than in any other context we've discovered yet. Nobody would have thought that," Waxman said.

"This early tuned sensitivity to human language has positive, cascading developmental consequences that go way beyond learning language," she concluded.