The Linguistic Genius of Babies

TED

In the beginning of the speech, the speaker Patricia Kuhl shows the picture of the baby, in this video, the speaker will talk about the baby’s little brain. The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us, that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science.

The speaker give an example,  a mother in India, she's speaking Koro to her baby to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies. language has a critical period for learning. We'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language. The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map.

By studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. So we've been studying the babies using a technique that we're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages. They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, in performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to "Ra" and "la" sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. The first is that the babies are listening intently to us and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk, they're taking statistics. So, listen to two mothers speaking Motherese, the universal language which uses when we talk to kids, first in English and then in Japanese.

 During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear and those distributions grow. Then, statistics of Japanese and English are very different. English has a lot of sound R and L. The distribution shows and the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese "R”. So, babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains, it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners. The other tests in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. Two months later, something incredible happens. But the Taiwanese babies are getting better not the American babies. What we did was expose American babies, during this period to Mandarin. It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions. Here's what it looked like in the laboratory.

The social brain is controlling, when the babies are taking their statistics. We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings. There is a new machine, Magnetoencephalography that allows us to do this. It looks like a hair dryer from Mars. But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent.

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 In the last of speech, Patricia Kuhl concludes, In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.