Babies and languages

Babies use their own names to help learn language. from psychological science- A baby’s understanding of language may begin with its own name, which a baby uses to break sentences into smaller parts so it can learn other words, according to new research by Texas A&M University psychologist Heather Bortfeld, who studies language development in infants and children.
To ensure a baby recognized the target word that followed its name, Bortfeld had the babies listen to the two individual target words again, this time with two new random words. In this scenario, a baby, she says, listened longer to the target word that had followed its name in the previous experiment. The baby listened to the other target word that did not follow its own name for as long as it listened to the two new random words.
Full article babies and language learning
This is very interesting for me as when I learn a foreign language I listen for my name and other words I know such as English words in Sentences or proper names of people and places. From these few concrete words. For example, I hear blah, blah ‘New York’ I am like aha and I try to make sense out of the sentence from this one word. Your brain reaches and looks for something to latch on to. With language learning whether it’s a baby or an adult a good technique is to put a lot of words you already know into the sentence from your own language (such as names of cities or common names) and your brain will accept it easier as it will find something concrete it can build on.

Tags: babies and langauges