06-12-24
Adults are getting smarter about how smart babies are. Not long ago, researchers learned that 4-day-olds could understand (36) addition and subtraction. Now, British research (37) psychologist Graham Schafer has discovered that infants can learn words for uncommon things long before they can speak. He found that 9-month-old infants could be taught, through repeated show-and-tell, to (38) recognize the names of objects that were foreign to them, a result that (39) challenges in some ways the received (40) wisdom that, apart from learning to (41) identify things common to their daily lives, children don’t begin to build vocabulary until well into their second year. “It’s no (42) secret that children learn words, but the words they tend to know are words linked to (43) specific situations in the home,” explains Schafer.
