Post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain and a team of researchers from Italy and Chile used optical brain imaging techniques in finding that the newborn's brain may simply be hard-wired to recognize certain repeated word patterns like "daddy" and "mommy."

Their findings were summarized in a Tuesday press release and the full study is published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

"It's probably no coincidence that many languages around the world have repetitious syllables in their 'child words' – baby and daddy in English, papa in Italian and tata (grandpa) in Hungarian, for example," says Gervain from UBC Dept. of Psychology's Infant Studies Center.

The scientists' imaging studies found increased brain activities in the temporal or left frontal areas of the babies' brains whenever repetitious words, even fictional ones, were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitive letters ("bamuba" or "napena") received no distinctive brain responses.