快猫短视频

STUDENTS should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away,
but they鈥檝e also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep.

By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even
simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they
might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as
when they are awake.

To test the theory, Cheour and her colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in
the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to an hour of
Finnish vowel sounds鈥攐ne that sounds like 鈥渙o鈥�, another like 鈥渆e鈥�, and a
third boundary vowel peculiar to Finnish and similar languages that sounds like
something in between. EEG recordings of the infants brains before and after the
session showed that the newborns could not distinguish between the sounds.

Fifteen of the babies then went back with their mothers, while the rest were
split into two sleep-study groups. One group was exposed throughout their
night-time sleeping hours to the same three vowels, while the others listened to
other, easier-to-distinguish vowel sounds.

When tested in the morning, and again in the evening, the babies who鈥檇 heard
the tricky boundary vowel all night showed brainwave activity indicating that
they could now recognise this new sound. They could identify the sound even when
its pitch was changed, while none of the other babies could pick out the
boundary vowel at all.

Cheour doesn鈥檛 know how babies accomplish this night-time learning, but she
suspects that the special ability might indicate that unlike adults, babies
don鈥檛 鈥渢urn off鈥� their cerebral cortex while they sleep. The skill probably
fades in the course of the first year of life, she adds鈥攕o forget the idea
that you can pick up tricky French vowels as an adult just by slipping a
language tape under your pillow. But while it may not help grown-ups, Cheour is
hoping to use the sleeping hours to give remedial help to babies who are
genetically at risk of language disorders.