Jutta L. Mueller and Ivonne Weyers, together with Angela D. Friederici (Max Planck Institute Leipzig) and Claudia Maennel (Charité Berlin), have published a paper showing that 3-year-old children learn complex patterns not only in speech, but also in the sequence of sounds. And the more the brain reacts to purely acoustic changes in volume, the better. In the case of hearing, simple perception therefore appears to be associated with more complex learning processes.
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