Gervain is excited by these findings because the order of sounds is building blocks of words and grammar.“Position is key to language,” she says. “If something is at the beginning or at the end, it makes a big difference:‘John caught the bear.’ is very different from ‘The bear caught John.’” 

Researchers led by scientist Patricia Kuhl have found that language delivered by televisions, audio books,the Internet, or smartphones—no matter how educational—doesn’t appear to be enough for children’s brain development. They carried out a study of nine-month-old American babies. They expected the first group who’d watched videos in Chinese to show the same kind of learning as the second group who were brought face-to-face with the same sounds. Instead they found a huge difference. The babies in the second group were able to distinguish between similar Chinese sounds as well as native listeners. But the other babies learned nothing.