Babies as young as six months old may understand that certain words and concepts are related to each other, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The study also found that babies were more likely to be able to understand a word when they had been more exposed to adults talking about the objects around them.
The team of researchers investigated whether six-month-old babies could understand ‘cross-word relations’, that is, the link between certain words and the concepts that go with them.
In order to gauge word comprehension, 51 babies and their caregivers were shown pairs of images that were related, such as ‘foot and hand’ or unrelated, such as ‘foot and milk’. For each pair, the caregiver, who couldn’t see the screen, was prompted to name one of the images out loud while an eye-tracking device followed the baby’s gaze.
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