Newborns show preference for their mother's voice and appear to be able to discriminate between the language spoken by their mother and other languages.

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The process of learning a language starts remarkably early, with evidence suggesting it begins even before birth. Newborn infants already exhibit a preference for their mother's voice and can distinguish between the language their mother speaks and other languages. This indicates that foundational aspects of language acquisition are established in the prenatal or immediate postnatal period.

Early Onset of Language Learning

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020, April 22). Psychology (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

OpenStax Psychology (2nd ed.) Textbook

Infants begin life with the remarkable ability to distinguish between the phonetic sounds of all human languages, effectively acting as 'universal listeners.' This broad perceptual capacity narrows within their first year. By approximately 12 months of age, their auditory perception becomes specialized, and they primarily discriminate only among the phonemes present in the language or languages they are regularly exposed to in their environment.

Infant Phoneme Discrimination and Perceptual Narrowing

Newborns demonstrate an early capacity for multimodal language processing by showing a preference for faces whose movements are synchronized with audible speech. This suggests an innate ability to link the visual and auditory components of language.

Infant Preference for Audiovisual Synchrony in Language

A research study finds that newborns whose mothers frequently read a specific story aloud during the final trimester of pregnancy show a distinct preference for that story over a new one after birth, as measured by changes in their sucking patterns. What is the most accurate conclusion to draw from this finding regarding the initial stages of language acquisition?

Newborn Language Discrimination

Babies are attuned to the languages being used around them and show preferences for videos of faces that are moving in synchrony with the audio of spoken language versus videos that do not synchronize with the audio.

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