Babies Categorize Sounds Before Words

As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies' speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture. Pat conducted some even more complicated experiments with Swedish babies using simple vowels to see how early they start organizing the sounds of their language in an adult-like way. She showed that at six months the process has already begun. The six...

 When Babies Learn Categorization

However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there behind the screen. But young babies seem content to think the toy somehow magically became a new kind of thing behind the screen. The particular kind of category-crossing magic tric...