STUDENTS should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away,
but they’ve also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep.
By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even
simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they
might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as
when they are awake.
To test the theory, Cheour and her colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in
the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to…
