A new study shows that babies can begin grasping complex language and ideas from an early age and that infants less than a year old can combine simple concepts into complex ideas!

Human creativity is unparalleled among other species. One aspect of human cognition that contributes to this feat is combinatorial thought, or the ability to assemble infinitely many complex ideas from a finite number of simple concepts. Combinatorial thought seems to be tightly linked to language use, which facilitates building and sharing complex ideas with others. Here, we show that human infants can combine quantity and kind concepts evoked by words embedded in multielement expressions (e.g., “padu duck”; “padu” was a made-up word for the quantity 2 taught during the experiment). Therefore, combinatorial processes for developing complex ideas begin to operate during the first year and may be not a consequence of language use but a perquisite for learning in general.

From the press release:

According to new research at the University of Birmingham, in the UK, and Central European University, in Austria and Hungary, babies are not only capable of creative thinking well before starting to speak, but this sort of thinking may be essential for language acquisition.

In the study, published in PNAS, the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at completely new thoughts and ideas. The basic mechanism for doing this is taking familiar concepts and combining them into new structures, but little is known about how early in life these abilities can be used.

The researchers found that babies were able to very quickly learn new words that describe small quantities — an impressive achievement — and combine these spontaneously with familiar words to fully understand a phrase.

Lead researcher, Dr Barbara Pomiechowska, carried out the research while a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU). She is now an assistant professor in the School of Psychology, at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.

Dr Pomiechowska said: “Human creativity has no boundaries: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases — but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this impressive ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges. This research shows that we must go right back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.”

In the study, the researchers worked with a cohort of 60 babies, all around the age of 12 months. They started by teaching the babies two novel words describing quantity: ‘mize’, to mean ‘one’, and ‘padu’, to mean ‘two’.

Then the babies were asked to combine these new number words with different object names, for example to identify ‘padu ducks’ from among a choice of images. By teaching novel words to represent quantities, the researchers were able to test the babies’ ability to combine concepts in real time, rather than simply recall combinations of words that they already knew from previous experience.

By using eye-tracking technology to monitor where the babies look, the researchers were able to show that the infants could successfully combine the two concepts to understand what they were being asked about.

Dr Agnes Kovacs, from CEU’s Department of Cognitive Science and CEU’s Cognitive Development Center, added: “For babies, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help not only to interpret the complex language input, but also to learn about different aspects of the physical and social world. For adults, it’s an ability that helps to move past everything that’s already been thought of, opening the mind towards endless possibilities.”

Abstract of the study:

Combinatorial thought, or the ability to combine a finite set of concepts into a myriad of complex ideas and knowledge structures, is the key to the productivity of the human mind and underlies communication, science, technology, and art. Despite the importance of combinatorial thought for human cognition and culture, its developmental origins remain unknown. To address this, we tested whether 12-mo-old infants (N = 60), who cannot yet speak and only understand a handful of words, can combine quantity and kind concepts activated by verbal input. We proceeded in two steps: first, we taught infants two novel labels denoting quantity (e.g., “mize” for 1 item; “padu” for 2 items, Experiment 1). Then, we assessed whether they could combine quantity and kind concepts upon hearing complex expressions comprising their labels (e.g., “padu duck”, Experiments 2-3). At test, infants viewed four different sets of objects (e.g., 1 duck, 2 ducks, 1 ball, 2 balls) while being presented with the target phrase (e.g., “padu duck”) naming one of them (e.g., 2 ducks). They successfully retrieved and combined on-line the labeled concepts, as evidenced by increased looking to the named sets but not to distractor sets. Our results suggest that combinatorial processes for building complex representations are available by the end of the first year of life. The infant mind seems geared to integrate concepts in novel productive ways. This ability may be a precondition for deciphering the ambient language(s) and building abstract models of experience that enable fast and flexible learning.