A research study of newborn babies has revealed that humans are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language.

The international team of researchers discovered two mechanisms in 3-day-old infants, which give them the skills to pick out words in a stream of sounds.

The discovery provides a key insight into a first step to learning language.

The study, published in Developmental Science, is a collaboration between scientists at SISSA in Italy, the Neurospin Centre in France, the University of Liverpool and The University of Manchester. It was funded by the European Research Council.

One of the mechanisms discovered by the team is known as prosody- the melody of language, which allow us to recognise when a word starts and stops.

And another they call the statistics of language, which describes how we compute the frequency of when sounds in a word come together.

Dr Alissa Ferry from The University of Manchester said: “We think this study highlights how sentient newborn babies really are and how much information they are absorbing.

”That’s quite important for new parents and gives them some insight into how their baby is listening to them.”