From infancy, little human brains have an affinity for processing speech signals and quickly realize that speech is one way to access the information inside other people’s minds. They’re particularly attuned to adult “baby talk” with a higher and more variable pitch, shorter sentences, and strong eye contact.27 Even before infants understand what words mean in a conventional sense, the sounds of the words introduce statistical regularity that speeds concept learning. The developmental psychologists Sandra R. Waxman and Susan A. Gelman, leaders in this area of research, hypothesize that words
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