In search of the basis for infant's first words

Infants recognize their first words long before they start speaking. What enables them to do so? A popular idea is that they track the transitional probabilities from one syllable to the next. Scientists at the MPI for Psycholinguistic found that this strategy works less well if the complexity of real languages is taken into account. Hence, they propose prosody, the "melody" of language, as an alternative starting point to learn one's first words.