Babies can grasp grammar at eight months

ONE might think babies care little for grammar as they babble in their prams.

But even as young as eight months, they grasp the difference between verbs and adjectives or articles and pronouns, researchers say. Some 175 babies were shown a fake language with ‘function’ words, or ‘functors’, such as ‘the’, ‘he’ or ‘she’. These were shown with rarer ‘content’ words for ‘rainbow’, ‘drive’ or ‘green’, for instance. The babies understood the ‘functors’ were more common and came before content words. The study observed how long they looked at visual displays for the two word types.

Author Dr Judit Gervain, of the University of Paris, said: ‘Even before speaking, babies master the grammar basics.’