(Photo by Pixabay via Pexels)
By Stephen Beech
Babies understand verbs before they even say their first words, according to a new study.
Researchers found that, by 10-months-old, youngsters are already beginning to understand verbs.
The study, conducted by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Cardiff University, is the first to test infants' understanding of verbs using brain imaging technology.
The researchers measured brain rhythms to visualize babies’ understanding of words.
The findings, published in the journal Cortex, showed that by 10 months of age, babies could detect "inconsistencies" between actions and the verbs describing them.
Dr. Kelsey Frewin said: “Around their first birthday, infants begin saying their first words.
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"For many infants, these words will describe caregivers – such as 'mama' – or other important family members – such as 'dog' - or prominent objects that feature frequently in their daily lives.
“Children’s vocabularies continue to feature nouns heavily during early development despite language input from caregivers frequently incorporating other word types, such as verbs.
“Learning the meaning of verbs is a complex task for babies, requiring them to segment verbs from speech, parse actions from motion, form action categories, and map verbs onto emerging action concepts.
"We wanted to further our understanding of when this happens in development.”
The scientists used an electroencephalogram (EEG) - a baby-friendly test that records the brain's electrical rhythms using small sensors inside a stretchy cap – to capture word understanding from infants' brain rhythms.
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While sitting on their parents’ lap, 10-month-olds watched videos of actions, paired either with a verb that was matched or mismatched to the action.
The researchers also consider that the findings could alternatively represent babies developing a sensitivity to co-occurrences between actions and verbs, which may serve as a precursor to later verb understanding.
The team say future research will be necessary to understand better the nature of infant responses to action-verb mismatches.
Dr. Frewin added: “Our findings suggest that 10-month-olds can detect action-verb mismatches.
"But so far, other research exploring the mechanisms that support verb understanding has mostly been conducted with much older infants and children, and so further investigation is needed to understand the processes that support this emerging verb understanding in the first year of life."
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