Infants and Prosody

Investigating how children can possibly learn language at such remarkable speeds, Patricia Kuhl at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington has discovered that the human brain in its early stages is particularly interested in classifying the statistical and prosodic patterns in language. The statistical distributions of sounds is used to infer phonemes and words. This process of language learning has a significant impact on the brain, because it alters the very way the brain works (basically, the brain tunes itself to detecting those patterns of speech). Thus the first language is learned faster than any other language, because other languages use different patterns from the ones that the brain has been modeled in early years to detect.