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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
Language and Cognition01:27

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 9, 2026

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
06:34

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Published on: July 1, 2015

Newborns' Language Discrimination May Not Reflect Sensitivity to Speech Rhythm: Evidence From Computational Modeling.

Ruolan Leslie Famularo1,2,3, Ali Aboelata2, Thomas Schatz4

  • 1Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.

Developmental Science
|May 8, 2026
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Newborns can distinguish languages without rhythm cues. Machine learning models show infants may use global speech properties, not just temporal patterns, for early language discrimination.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Human newborns exhibit an innate ability to discriminate between different languages.
  • This early language discrimination has been traditionally attributed to infants' sensitivity to speech rhythm and temporal regularities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether language discrimination in newborns can occur independently of rhythmic information.
  • To challenge existing theories on infant speech perception and suprasegmental information acquisition.

Main Methods:

  • Computational simulations using machine learning models.
  • Analysis of naturalistic speech stimuli presented to models.
  • Systematic removal of temporal and rhythmic information from speech data.

Main Results:

  • Machine learning models successfully discriminated between languages without relying on rhythmic or temporal cues.
  • Model performance mirrored the discrimination abilities observed in human newborns.
  • Language discrimination was achievable by processing global acoustic properties of speech.

Conclusions:

  • Early language discrimination in human newborns may not depend on speech rhythm.
  • Infants might perceive broader acoustic features of language, suggesting a different mechanism for suprasegmental information processing.
  • This finding necessitates a re-evaluation of current theories on infant speech perception and language acquisition.