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Children 6 months "know" separate words in speech

Intonation and accents in speech help children six months not only to distinguish separate words, and also to link them to the visual information U.S. scientists say.

According to scientists at the University of Rochester (U.S. ), listed by the magazine P roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigating the process of assimilation of language in children, babies quickly assimilate the language, but the nature of these capabilities has not been well studied.

In particular, it is not clear how children learn to "break" the flow of the sounds they hear, to turn them into semantic units, not knowing the rules of a language, said Shukla Mohinish , a researcher at the University of Rochester.

scientists investigated 13 boys and 11 girls from 165 to 192 days of age. Children were shown a picture of a table in a room, moving on a red circle, a blue square and a yellow triangle. Scientists were observing the movement of children through special sensors.

During training "volunteers" one of the authors spoke five semantic constructions

syllables, in which two syllables are separated especially from the accent and intonation. At that time the screen moved the red circle chosen by scientists as an object of study. So the authors "linked" the visual and audio information.

small then looked at the table with the figures and listened longer sentences pronounced by the same person. At the same time, scientists controlled, how the children reacted to "the word of two syllables, that during the training included in the red circle.

turned out that the young research participants not only watched the entire circle and hold, that other figures, but also clearly reacted to the pronunciation of his "denomination." Also, if this "word" in isolated experimental speech in intonation and accent, children shift their attention to the circle.

can be assumed that children from the very beginning of life "are programmed" to understand that words are linked some way to the borders of intonation of the sentences, which contributes to the process of memorizing words, - concludes the paper.