Are there universal brain structures that determine how they will be baby's first words, whatever its origin, and the process of acquiring any language?
More and more scientific studies support the theory that language has a biological substrate and shares certain characteristics among all human beings, regardless of where they were born and the stimuli they receive at an early age.
One of the most striking experiments on how we are born with a genetic linguistic pattern It is the one carried out by Rochester psychologists Jenny Saffran, Dick Aslin and Elissa Newport.
The authors demonstrated that with only four days old, babies are already able to tell the difference between a series of words of three syllables and another of words of two syllables (I say, then also of monosyllables, tetrasyllables, etc.), and this considering that the syllables are of different nature in different languages.
In the experiment, they also presented eight month long babies with a long and monotonous succession of unbroken syllables such as:
Tibudopabikudaropigolatupabikutibudogolatudaropitibudopabikugolatu.
Faced with this succession of meaningless sounds, eight-month-old babies were able to extract certain "information" with meaning, such as camouflaged words among other syllables and partial words they recognized in their language.
We have already seen a study that approaches the innate ability of newborns to decipher structural patterns in language, showing us that they are already born with the ability to perceive and learn the mother tongue systematically and efficiently.
Therefore, it seems logical that our brain is prepared with certain universal abilities, although it is necessary that the words around us are produced, and that we be able to perceive them, so that we can do the exercise of imitation, acquisition and learning of a language.
