Sensitivity to Prosody at 6 Months Predicts Vocabulary at 24 Months

Children’s language acquisition appears effortless, and advances enormously between the first word period, at about 12 months, to the stage at which complete and often complex sentences are produced, at about 3 years. However, this apparently miraculous process may in fact rely on knowledge that the child has began to accumulate even before birth. Indeed, work on infant speech perception in the last 40 years suggests that infants begin to attune to their native language during the first year of life.