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Adults are getting smarter about how smart babies are. Not long ago, researchers learned that 4-day-oldcould understand addition and subtraction. Now, British research psychologist Graham Schafer has discovered that infants can learn words for uncommon things long before they can speak. He found that 9-month old infants could be taught, through repeated show-and-tell, to recognize the names of objects that were foreign to them, a result that challenges in some ways the received wisdom that, apart from learning to identify things common to their daily lives, children don’t begin to build vocabulary until well into their second year.
"It’s no secret that children learn words, but the words they tend to know are words linked to specific situations in the home,” explains Schafer. "This is the first demonstration that we can choose what words the children will learn and that they can respond to them with an unfamiliar voice giving instructions in an unfamiliar setting. Figuring out how humans acquire language may shed light on why some children learn to read and write later than others, Schafer says, and could lead to better treatments for developmental problems. What's more, the study of language acquisition offers direct insight into how humans learn.“Language is a test case for human cognitive development,” says Schafer. But parents eager to teach their infants should take note even without being taughtnew words, a control group caught up with the other infants within a fewm onths. "This is not about advancing development," he says. "It’s just about what children can do at an earlier age than what educators have often thought."
