No, but they learn the words for various body parts very early in life, usually before the age of 2 and beginning around 1-year-old. A 2-year-old also has significant physiological and neurological constraints on vocalizations.

There are also cognitive development constraints, of course.

The question is, from where do we get the correlation? If it's physiological or neurological, then there's nothing to support fanciful claims of innate language models. It's the cognitive constraints that can support fanciful claims, but you have to first show that it's those constraints, rather than the physiological or neurological constraints, that are controlling word choice.

Yeah, for a very, very, very small subset of words, the very first and most immediate things babies care about, this theory makes some sense.

For everything else, not so much.

100 basic words (the corpus of the study) is such a small subset, especially if you posit very strong correlations among subsets of those 100 words most likely to be used in the first year of life.

And especially considering that the researchers "reduced all sounds to 34 distinct consonants and 7 vowels." (Consider that the more we reduce and simplify the vocalizations the more likely we should expect correlations. For example, if we simplified all sounds to grunts we should expect tremendous overlap.)

The correlation of the corpus of 100 words isn't particularly surprising given what we already know about language development. The null hypothesis was that there'd be no correlation whatsoever (i.e. the sounds would be completely random), which I don't think anybody could reasonably expect.

Indeed. Especially when the article gives us this: "...the team found a lot more consistency across languages than they had expected." What does that mean? Were their originally expectations reasonable, or did they merely re-discover the birthday paradox?