Adults Can Still Learn Language Like a Baby Before you spoke your first language, you didn't go to a class and study grammar — you listened to others until one day "mama" or something similar came out! This is language acquisition, the natural process that allows babies to understand and produce language. Babies acquire language with very little direct help from adults. It starts with them spending a long time listening to the people around them. This even happens in the womb, where they can hear outside sounds before they're born, picking up on rhythms and tones. And research suggests that adults still have and can use that natural language acquisition ability for new languages. This is referred to as "second language acquisition," though it could apply to a third or fourth language too. One study from the Czech Republic found that adults could quickly pick up the rhythm and basic sounds of a new language. This is also called prosody, and is an important part of how babies acquire their first language, as well as something considered difficult for adult learners to master. The researchers had 174 Czech adults listen to five minutes of Māori, a language from New Zealand they had never heard before. To make the experience just like that of a baby, the Māori was edited to seem like it was being heard inside the womb too. Then the participants listened to a mix of audio in either Māori or Malay, another language they didn't know, and were asked if they were listening to the same language as before. And in fact, the adults were very good at hearing the difference between the two languages. The researchers say this shows that even a very small amount of exposure to a new language is enough for adults to understand its rhythms and patterns, just like a baby listening to its first language.