Scientists have found that people know languages from birth

According to American scientists, people are born with the fundamental knowledge of languages. The results of this study were published in the scientific journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. Despite the fact that different languages differ from each other, they have many common features. According to scientists, this happens due to the General linguistic principles established in the human brain. "According to the results of our study, sound schemes, different languages of the world are the product of innate biological instinct. Something like birdsong,” says Professor iris Berent of northeastern University of Boston (USA) who conducted research together with colleagues from the International school of research in Italy.

Certain combinations of sounds common to all languages of the world

As an example, scientists lead the combination of sounds that occur at the beginning of words. In languages such as Italian, English, Spanish, words often begin with the combination of sounds “BL” (e.g., blando (Italian), blink (English), blusa (Spanish). There are languages that at the beginning of words use a combination of “lb”, for example Russian — the word “forehead”. However, even in the Russian language this combination is very rare, much rarer than the combination “BL”.

Linguists believe that this happens because the human brain is wired a certain way. He prefers a combination of “BL” and not “lb”. The results of the experiments, which involved adults, have confirmed this hypothesis.





Kids come into this world with knowledge

Now scientists have conducted a number of tests with newborn babies. Using spectroscopy, scientists have measured the brain response of children to the words with different sound combinations (e.g., blif, lbif).

It turned out that the kids and their parents-to a miscellaneous reacted to a “good” combination “BL” and “bad” is “lb”. Despite the fact that newborns have not yet had time to learn or even haven't begun to babble, they were sensitive to sound of different combinations of sounds.





According to scientists, this study confirms that human beings are born with fundamental knowledge about audio circuits common to all languages of the world. Kids come into this world with the knowledge and willingness to recognize the sound patterns of words in any language, no matter in what corner of the planet, they have to live.

Source: babyreporter.eu