This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Babies come prepared to learn any of the world's languages.

Allison Bruterer, a cognitive scientist at the University of British Columbia.

Which means that no matter where you're growing up in the world, their brains are prepared to pick

up the language that they're listening to around them.

And listen, they do.

But another key factor to discerning a language's particular sounds

may be for babies to move their tongues as they listen.

Britterer and her colleagues tested that notion

by sitting 24 six-month-olds in front of a video screen and displaying a checkerboard pattern, while they played one of two tracks, a single repeated D sound in Hindi, or two slightly different alternating D sounds.

The idea here is that babies have a short attention span, so novel things hold their gaze.

And indeed, the babies did stare at the screen longer while the alternating D's played,

then for the single D, indicating they could detect the novelty.

Until that is, the researchers blocked the baby's tongue movements

by having him suck on a teething device.

Then the effect disappeared.

With the baby's unable to differentiate from

and when the babies used a different teether that did not block tongue movement they once again appeared to The of Sciences. So is it time to pull the pacifier? At this point I don't think that these

these data suggests that parents should be taking away teething toys or soothers. The majority of

infants are chewing on something semi-regularly throughout

the day and they're probably not doing it all day every day and most of these infants do go on to develop

speech normally. So not to worry. Bruterer says the research might

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