Why 'papa', 'mommy', are a baby's first words

BABY TALK: A study on a newborn infant's innate ability to decipher structural patterns in language.

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Toronto: A new Canadian study shows why ``papa'', ``daddy'' and ``mommy'' are the only first words new-born babies understand.

The study, conducted by Judit Gervain of Vancouver's University of British Columbia and her team, says that babies are born with an innate ability to recognize these words. It concludes that the human brain is hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns and decipher languages.

Using the latest optical brain imaging techniques, Gervain and her team of researchers from Italy and Chile documented brain activities of 22 newborns (2-3 days old) when exposed to recordings of made-up words.

They found increased brain activities in the temporal and left frontal areas of the newborns' brain whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions elicited no distinctive responses from the brain.

``We conducted this study in Italy where we picked up 44 infants and divided them into two groups to carry out two sets of experiments. We exposed them to about 22 minutes of recordings of the above-mentioned words,'' says Gervain

``While they were exposed to the recordings, we monitored the oxygen levels in blood in their brain areas. We found that when the babies heard the words `papa', `daddy', and `mommy', the blood oxygen level in certain brain areas went up. It showed those brain areas became active on hearing these words (papa, mommy), and thus needed more oxygen,'' she added

This is one of the first studies on a newborn infant's innate ability to decipher structural patterns in language.

The study has been published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science's online Early Edition.