Baby, can you hear me?

Speech is a complex thing. To understand a spoken langage, you need to make sense of consonants, vowels, intonation or rhythm. To make it harder, this can be influenced by the person speaking, his/her accent, or even background noises. This is a difficult task our brains perform every day. How do babies fare, as their brains are not fully developped yet? Do they perceive complex acoustic information the same way as adults? Discover how babies can help us understand how we all hear and process language.

Did you know that children need you to talk louder to understand you in a noisy and crowded environment? In the last decades, scientists have tested children's reactions to sounds of people speaking. The different techniques used helped understand how acoustic information was perceived and processed at an early age: kids' behaviours and brain activity related to sounds of speaking revealed that children might not rely on the same sound characteristics as adults. These intriguing results shed a new light on how children learn a language and may help children with hearing loss.