We speak different languages, but in terms of language ability as such, we all have something in common.
We speak different languages, but in terms of language ability as such, we all have something in common. From birth, we distinguish consonances by whether they are suitable “candidates” for the role of a word, psychologists at Northeastern University (USA) found out *. They observed how the brains of children who could not yet speak reacted to different combinations of sounds. For example, children were more supportive of the combination “blah” because they perceived it as a potential word or part of a word, in contrast to some other combinations of sounds. The same effect was observed in adults, even if these combinations were not in their native language. This brain scan experiment confirmed that our speech center is programmed for certain language forms. In other words, in the human brain there is a universal “stencil”, thanks to which we distinguish a random set of sounds from a meaningful speech, even if it is spoken in a language unknown to us.
* Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014, vol. 111, № 16.