NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New evidence shows that babies may use familiar words such as their names to break sentences into smaller parts and understand language.

Dr. Heather Bortfeld of Texas A&M University and her colleagues found that babies as young as 6 months can learn to recognize an individual word that follows their own names, even when both words have only been presented to the infants as part of whole sentences.

These findings indicate that a baby's name--which research shows has become familiar to the child by the age of 4-1/2 months--"can serve as an anchor into the speech stream," Bortfeld told Reuters Health.

If one familiar word can allow babies to pick out another word from sentences, Bortfeld reasoned, that newly familiar word may, in turn, allow babies to learn the words that follow it, a pattern which continues as the babies learn more and more about the language.

"That popping out effect should allow you to grab that next thing that follows the next thing," Bortfeld explained.

This research "is an indication of the importance of talking to your kids," she added.

She and her colleagues presented their findings in New Orleans at the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Society. In the first set of experiments, she and her team tested how well infants recognized words that had followed either their own names or another unfamiliar name.

In the first experiment, infants listened to a series of sentences, half of which contained their name followed by a particular word like "bike," such as "Emma's bike," repeated in different places in each sentence, and the other half contained the other name followed by another word like "cup." The infants then heard either "bike" or "cup," and they indicated they preferred the word that had followed their own name.

In order to determine if that preference actually meant the infants had recognized the word that followed their name, Bortfeld and her team repeated the experiment. The infants again listened to the word that followed their name, the other word they had heard, and two unfamiliar words that were not included in the sentences.

In this experiment, the infants listened longer to the word that had followed their name, and listened to the word paired with the other name for as long as they listened to the unfamiliar words, indicating they had recognized the word paired with their names, and not the others.

In an interview with Reuters Health, Bortfeld explained that this process infants go through is just their way of trying to understand the world around them. "Everyone agrees there's a drive to make sense of your environment," she said. "You're hearing this stuff all the time, eventually something will stick."

Bortfeld added that these findings could influence our understanding of what helps adults learn new languages, as well. "You've got to understand how we do it the first time around," she noted.

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