The ability to communicate of the human being transcends verbal language: there are the codes of gestural signs, the morse, the rubber whistle, the Indian smoke signals, the pictograms … But is this flexibility innate or learned? Are we pre-programmed to learn words or does it depend on the stimuli we receive early in life? A group of researchers from Northwestern University, in Illinois (USA) has asked the same question, and for this they have tested six-month-old babies.
The experiment consisted of the creatures watching a short video where two people were having a conversation: one of them spoke in English and the other responded with beeps, like a machine. Then, the children were subjected to various tests to see if they linked these sounds to new categories of objects , a cognitive operation in which, as is known, spoken discourse does influence. The experts observed that the study subjects also associated the beeps with the abstract process of categorizing objects.
Similar trials had previously yielded negative results, but as Northwestern University researchers point out, babies had not previously been exposed to the new sounds, so they were not seen as communicative elements. “This finding shows that children have the social ability to recognize an entirely new signal and then assimilate it to support cognition. Babies, like adults, are attentive to the ways in which people around them communicate with each other ”.
