We often think of babies as blank canvases with little ability to learn during the first few weeks of life. But babies actually start processing language and speech incredibly early. Even while in the ...

Some songbirds learn to sing by listening to other birds. Some other animals can learn to copy sounds. But what does that tell us about human speech? Sonja Vernes from the Max Planck Institute for ...

Infants can differentiate most sounds soon after birth, and by age 1, they become language-specific listeners. But researchers are still trying to understand how babies recognize which acoustic ...

Children who move while learning sounds of letters significantly improve their ability to recognize individual letter sounds. This is the conclusion of a new study conducted by the University of ...

You might think that young children would first learn to recognize sounds and then learn how those categories of sounds fit together into words. But that isn't how it works. Rather, kids learn sounds ...

Why are some animals good at learning sounds? Did this skill appear when animals started 'faking' their body size by lowering calls? In a new study on a wide range of mammals,researchers revisit this ...

Some animals fake their body size by sounding bigger than they actually are. Maxime Garcia from the University of Zurich and Andrea Ravignani from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics ...

Learning to make sounds by listening to others is a skill that helps make us human. But research now suggests a species of monkey may have evolved similar abilities. Marmosets have the capacity to ...

Alex the grey parrot, who famously asked “what color?” when looking in the mirror, had astonishing abilities to mimic human speech. Interest in the ability of animals to learn sounds dates back ...