Italian for beginners: Four-month-olds can detect grammatical rules in new language

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 11:30 in Psychology & Sociology

(PhysOrg.com) -- Infants are able to learn grammatical regularities in a novel language surprisingly early and at a remarkable speed. In a study at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, researchers working with Angela Friederici showed that the brains of babies were able to learn grammatical relationships between sentence elements in less than 15 minutes and reacted to errors that broke these rules. This was investigated by playing recordings of sentences in Italian to four month old German babies and taking EEG measurements. (Plos One, 22. 03. 2011)

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