Today we took our now ten-months-old girl to the Laboratoire Psychologique de la Perception at Paris V – Descartes University.

She got to listen to a two-syllable sound (“ka-ba”) that was pronounced with different stresses, and by German and French native speakers. A light would blink on her left or right, and when she looked that way, the sound would start and go on until she looked away.
From my position (holding her in my lap) I couldn’t tell, but the lab lady said she understood that it was up to her whether a given sound continued or not.
So the duration of her looking in the direction of a given sound indicated how much she enjoyed hearing it. The idea being that she would enjoy hearing familiar sounds – at ten months, babies’ brains are hard-wired for the sounds of the languages they hear regularly and have discarded those they don’t hear (and thus don’t need).
Who knew?

Another thing I learned today is that apparently it is easier for babies to imitate sounds they can see, that is where they can copy mommy’s or daddy’s lip movement, than those they can’t see.
Hence why they’ll do “b” sounds before rolling their r’s.