Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Secret Of Newborn's First Words Revealed. Using the latest optical brain imaging techniques, a team of researchers documented brain activities of 22 newborns (2-3 days old) when exposed to recordings of made-up words. The researchers mixed words that end in repeating syllables—such as "mubaba" and "penana”—with words without repetition—such as "mubage" and "penaku." They found increased brain activities in the temporal and left frontal areas of the newborns" brain whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions ("bamuba" or "napena”) elicited no distinctive responses from the brain. Here is an abstract of the original research.