How people work out the meanings of new words has been revealed by researchers, who say this is similar to the way in which young children learn language. The researchers said: »A lot of what infants hear is »who’s a lovely baby yes you are now where’s teddy gone oh look here is teddy». How do babies begin to make sense of this burbling to figure out the language?»

The research published in Cognition is by Professor Patrick Rebuschat and Professor Padraic Monaghan, who said: «Have you ever caught yourself saying long burbly streams of words to babies? A lot of what infants hear is «who’s a lovely baby yes you are now where’s teddy gone oh look here is teddy.» How do babies begin to make sense of this burbling to figure out the language?»

There are two problems about language that young children have to solve:

1. they need to work out which sounds group together to form words and what these words mean

2. they need to understand how those words go together in sentences

These problems are interwoven, because to be able to acquire the meaning of words the child also needs to know what role they play in the sentence: is the word «teddy» about a thing, or what the thing is doing, or something else? And to figure out what a word’s role is, the child needs to already know what it means.

Professor Rebuschat said: «This is a chicken-and-egg type of problem: Which comes first, the word or the sentence?»

To find out, the researchers tested how people learned new words and sentence by giving adults an artificial language to learn. They invented a language spoken by aliens and showed people sentences in alien language alongside scenes showing aliens carrying out different actions.

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