• last year
And they likely benefit from any verbal interaction too.
Transcript
00:00 While babies might seem pretty helpless right after they're born, it turns out they're
00:07 putting their energy elsewhere.
00:09 A new study reveals that even in the first couple of hours after an infant is born, they're
00:13 already well on their way to learning language.
00:16 Researchers discovered this by placing data gathering devices on the heads of newborns,
00:20 devices which track changes in oxygen levels in their brains.
00:23 They found that when infants were played the sounds of backwards vowels, they initially
00:26 could not determine the difference from the normal forward version.
00:29 However, just a few hours later, after having listened to both normal speech and the backwards
00:33 vowel sounds, they could, meaning the babies had learned the difference simply by listening.
00:37 The researchers also detected different parts of the infants' brains cross-talking or communicating
00:42 with each other, but they only discovered this in the brains of the trained babies,
00:46 not the control group, which they say likely means infants who were spoken to in the first
00:50 hours of their lives likely benefit from that verbal interaction.
00:54 [music]
00:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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