Littlest Pitchers Have Big Ears, Study Says

WASHINGTON — Better watch your language around the cradle. Babies as young as 8 months can hear and remember words--good and bad--researchers have discovered.

“Little ears are listening,” said Peter W. Jusczyk of Johns Hopkins University.

Jusczyk said new research shows that reading to children at such an early age, even if they don’t seem to understand, can start the process of learning language.

“As you are sitting there reading, the child is learning something about sound patterns of words,” he said. “That is important because they learn how words are formed and it helps them to segment sound patterns out of speech.”

The conclusion is based on experiments in which infants listened repeatedly to three recorded stories. Two weeks later, the babies’ recognition of words from those stories was compared against words that were not in the stories. Jusczyk said it was clear the infants recognized the story words.

A report on the study appears today in the journal Science.

In the study, tape-recorded stories were played to 8-month-olds once a day for 10 days. Two weeks later, the infants were tested in a lab to see if they remembered.

Researchers used two lists: one with 36 words from the stories, and another that had similar words that were not in the stories.

“Earlier work showed that infants tend to look at the source of sounds that interest them,” he said. When they lose interest, the infants tend to look away.

“We found they listened significantly longer to lists of words from the stories,” Jusczyk said.