THE LINGUISTIC GENIUS OF BABIES

By Patricia Kuhl Welcome to my blog. In this opportunity, I’d like to summarize a video by Patricia Kuhl. In this video, she speaks about an interesting topic, is the linguistic genius of babies for 10.17 minutes. She opens her speech by showing a photo of baby but she will speak about something which we can not see, it is their little brain. She explains about two studies of the baby brain. The first is by using the modern tool of neuroscience are demonstrating to us what’s going on up there is nothing short of rocket science and the second is her study aims to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the “celestial openness” of the child’s mind. She also explain reason we can not preserve the language by speaking to adult because a language has a period for learning. Babies and children in their period on learning, they can preserve the language if we speak with them because they are genius. When they turn seven, there is a systematic decline. After we puberty, we fall off the map. No scientist dispute this curve but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way. Her lab is focused on the first critical period in development which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language. We think, how the sounds are learned. We will have a model for the rest of language and perhaps fro critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. They have learned that babies all over the world describe as citizens of the world. They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we are testing and what language we are using. Remarkable because we cannot do that because we are culture bound listeners. We can discriminate the sounds of our language but not those of foreign language. During critical two month period, this is the critical period for sound development and there are two things going on. The first, the babies are listening us intently and they are taking statistics as they listen to us talk. Bilinguals people must keep to sets of statistic in mind at once and flip between them.