Washington: Babies, even those too young to talk, can well understand many of the words that adults say - and their brains also process them in a grown-up way, a new study has claimed.
A team at the University of California has shown that babies just over a year old process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time, combining the cutting-edge brain scanning technologies,
the 'Cerebral Cortex' journal reported.
Moreover, researchers have found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning.
"Babies are using the same brain mechanisms as adults to access the meaning of words from what is thought to be a mental 'database' of meanings, a database which is continually being updated right into adulthood," said Katherine Travis,
the study's first author.
Previously, many people thought infants might use an entirely different mechanism for learning words, and that learning began primitively and evolved into the process used by adults. Determining the areas of the brain responsible for learning, however, has been hampered by a lack of evidence showing where language is processed in the developing brain.
In the study, in order to determine if infants use the same functional networks as adults to process word meaning, the researchers used MEG - an imaging process that measures tiny magnetic fields emitted by neurons in the brain - and MRI to estimate brain activity in 12 to 18-month old infants.
In the first experiment, the infants listened to words accompanied by sounds with similar acoustic properties,but no meaning, in order to determine if they were capable of distinguishing between the two.
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