When it comes to the differences that exist between speech and non-speech sounds, infants are equally smarter as adults to recognize the same. Yes, in a recent study it has been discovered that infants as small as nine-month-old even have the ability of distinguishing between speech and non-speech sounds. Whether these are produced by humans or animals, they can easily judge out the difference.

For conducting this study, researchers analyzed how infants’ response to recorded human and parrot speech and non-speech sounds. Though parrot speech is quite similar to human speech, but they were surprised to see that infants at such young age were even capable of distinguishing between the two. They found them listening longer to human speech as compared to human non-speech sounds. However, there were some visual spurs too for their help but those hardly guided them throughout. This entire study helped scientists believed that infants are able to recognize human speech regardless of the context they were offered.

As said by Athena Vouloumanos, assistant professor of psychology at New York University and author of the study “Our results show that speech perception of infants is resilient and flexible. This means that our recognition of speech is more refined at an earlier age than we’d thought”.