Read: There’s More to Your Infant’s Language Skills Than Their First Words Suggest

A common theme that underpins language research is that language development is an impressively complex process. This article from Very Well Family summarizes the findings of a 2021 study from the University of Edinburgh that gives us a new piece of this puzzle. The results show that babies can remember multiword sentences even before they can speak themselves. They seem to learn words and word combinations at the same time, and they also pay more attention to familiar phrases than unfamiliar ones. This means that long before children are speaking in full sentences, they understand a lot about the language they hear.

The article also notes that word learning happens in context, that is, by listening to the rest of the sentence where a new word appears. So for caregivers, it is recommended to talk to your baby regularly throughout the day—they’re paying attention!

The article by Skarabela et al. can be found online here in the journal Cognition.