the linguistic genius of babies

Patricia Kuhl: the linguistic genius of babies

The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what’s going on up in baby brain, it’s described as celestial openness of the child’s mind.

The speaker shows a picture of a mother who speak Koro to her baby in India. Koro is a newly discover language. the mother and 800 people who speak Koro in the world should preserve that, so they need to it with their babies. The question is why they can not preserve the language by adult?

The statistic shows a critical period of learning language, from the statistic we know that the high score of learning new language placed by age 3-7 years old children), it’s genius period while the low score for aged 17-39 years old (adult).

The speaker’s lab is focused on the first critical period in development, in which babies try to master the sounds are used in their language, in critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. They using a technology (experiments) for a mother and her baby that sounds of all languages. From the experiment we get the information that baby can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, but as an adult we can not do, we can discriminate our own language.

Bilingual people, how their brains work? Bilinguals must keep two set statistics in mind at once. So, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language? they conduct a test for american babies who never heard second language to mandarin for the first time during critical period. Another groups of baby, who’s heard by audio and video (TV), the results show that audio is no learning whatsoever and video is same. For babies to take their listening, it takes human being, it’s controlled by social brain.