"Babies might be little statisticians"

Babies seem to take their first linguistic steps by finding patterns. Evidence is emerging that they have an innate ability to track the probability with which sounds, syllables and words occur together or certain distances apart.

"Babies might be little statisticians," says Jenny Saffran. In her work at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, Saffran has found that eight-month-old babies respond -- by turning their heads for longer towards the synthesized voice she plays them -- to syllables more likely to be found together in words.

From hearing phrases such as 'pretty dog', 'little dog', 'pretty cat' and 'little cat', babies appear to conclude that the sounds 'pri' and 'tee' or 'li' and 'tle' often come together but that 'teedo', 'teeca', 'tledo' or 'tleca' are less common.

Saffran believes that this kind of instinctive analysis may help babies start to work out where each word starts and ends in the "babbling brook" that is adult speech.

She has also found that all babies seem to have something like perfect pitch -- they respond to familiar notes, whereas most adults remember only intervals in pitch. "I suspect that those of us whose first languages are not tonal ones such as Korean or Thai probably lose this facility because we don't need it and it becomes too confusing," she says.

As they get older, infants seem to use a similar pattern-recognition principle to get a handle on sentence structure, according to Rebecca Gomez of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She has found that 16-month-olds are drawn to the likelihood of a sound or a word being followed several sounds or words later by another.

For instance, babies surrounded by English might quickly learn that 'I' is often followed three sounds later by 'ing': 'I am running', 'I like jumping', 'I go cycling'.

"Infants are attuned to statistical regularities in language," Gomez agrees. "And they are intelligent enough to abandon one processing mode when another is more useful -- when the most predictive information comes from a different pattern to the one they are focusing on, they switch," she says of the shift from syllable to word-string analysis with age.

But thanks to the way that adults instinctively talk to them, babies might not have to work that hard all the time. Mothers use a lot of single words when speaking to their infants, says Michael Brent of Washington University, St Louis, who has been taping them. In his experience, the words mothers use most frequently in isolation are usually the ones that babies learn first.

"Exposure to isolated words may significantly facilitate vocabulary development at its earliest stages," says Brent. He speculates that it might even be possible to "train voice recognition software using the kind of speech that mothers use with their children".

Which would make a change from the isolated words that most people use on their crash-prone PCs.