Grammar? It’s child’s play

BABIES can understand the basics of grammar months before they start speaking, scientists say.

Researchers in France have found that infants as young as eight months are able to distinguish between function words — such as articles, pronouns or prepositions — and content words, which include nouns, verbs or adjectives.

The team from the University of Paris say their findings, published in the journal Current Biology, show babies are able to understand grammatical construction much earlier than thought, even though they do not start stringing words together until they are about two years old.

Dr Judit Gervain, a researcher at the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition

Centre at the University of Paris, said: “It is often believed that grammar is something complicated that babies learn once they know a large number of words.

“Here, we show that they already start learning the grammar at the same time as they start learning words.”

The researchers recruited 175 eight-month-old babies from French-speaking households as part of their study.

The infants listened to a four-minute recording of a made-up language in which frequent words, imitating function words, alternated with rarer ones, emulating content words, in six different grammar-learning experiments.

The babies’ word preferences were evaluated by observing how long they looked at displays associated with the made-up word.

The researchers found their young test subjects understood that function words were more frequent and came before content words and then built rudimentary representations of grammar.