Babies can grasp complex language earlier than once thought, researchers prove

New research from the University of Birmingham, in the UK, and Central European University, in Austria and Hungary, indicates that babies can begin grasping complex language and ideas at less than 12 months of age, proving that creativity begins in babyhood. 

According to researchers, babies are not only capable of creative thinking well before starting to speak, but this sort of thinking may be essential for language acquisition.

In the study the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at completely new thoughts and ideas. The basic mechanism for doing this is taking familiar concepts and combining them into new structures, but little is known about how early in life these abilities can be used.

“Human creativity has no boundaries: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases – but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this impressive ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges,” Dr Barbara Pomiechowska from the University of Birmingham said.

“This research shows that we must go right back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.”

The researchers found that babies were able to very quickly learn new words that describe small quantities – an impressive achievement – and combine these spontaneously with familiar words to fully understand a phrase.

In the study, the researchers worked with a cohort of 60 babies, all around the age of 12 months. They started by teaching the babies two novel words describing quantity: ‘mize’, to mean ‘one’, and ‘padu’, to mean ‘two’.

Then the babies were asked to combine these new number words with different object names, for example to identify ‘padu ducks’ from among a choice of images. By teaching novel words to represent quantities, the researchers were able to test the babies’ ability to combine concepts in real time, rather than simply recall combinations of words that they already knew from previous experience.

By using eye-tracking technology to monitor where the babies look, the researchers were able to show that the infants could successfully combine the two concepts to understand what they were being asked about.

“For babies, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help not only to interpret the complex language input, but also to learn about different aspects of the physical and social world,” fellow researcher Dr Agnes Kovacs, from CEU’s Department of Cognitive Science and CEU’s Cognitive Development Center added. 

“For adults, it’s an ability that helps to move past everything that’s already been thought of, opening the mind towards endless possibilities.”

Access the research here.