But just because infants cannot articulate their thoughts, it does not mean that they are not processing language, and from the very start. In a fascinating research study, Stanislas Dehaene and his wife, the neuropediatrician Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, looked at the brain activation of two-month-old infants while they listened to their mothers speak. Using a very comfortable adaptation of fMRI,5 they found that the same language network that we use for listening to speech was activated in those babies.
