Prerequisites of language acquisition in the newborn brain

Learning to decode and produce speech is one of the most demanding tasks faced by infants. Nevertheless, infants typically utter their first words within a year, and phrases soon follow. Here we review cognitive abilities of newborn in-fants that promote language acquisition, focusing primarily on studies tapping neural activity. The results of these studies indicate that infants possess core adult auditory abilities already at birth, including statistical learning and rule ex-traction from variable speech input. Thus, the neonatal brain is ready to catego-rize sounds, detect word boundaries, learn words, and separate speech streams: in short, to acquire language quickly and efficiently from everyday linguistic input.

Automated summary

Learning to decode and produce speech is a challenging task for infants, but they are able to utter their first words within a year and learn phrases quickly. Studies on neural activity suggest that newborns have core auditory abilities, such as statistical learning and rule extraction from speech input, which enable them to acquire language efficiently. The neonatal brain is prepared to categorize sounds, detect word boundaries, and learn and separate speech streams from everyday linguistic input.