THE LINGUISTIC GENIUS OF BABY
By :Patricia Kuhl
Summarized by : Najmiatul Fauza
Ms Patricia talked about the
genius language of baby. The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to
us that what’s going on up there is nothing short of rocket science and what we
are learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets
described as the “celestial openness”of the child’s mind.
Baby and children are
geniuses until they turn seven and then there is a systematic decline . as the
first critical period in development and that is the period in which babies try
to master which sound are used in their language. By studying how the sound are
learned, we will have a model for the rest of language and perhaps for critical
period in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. They have
been studying the babies using a technique that we are using all over the world
and the sound of all languages. The result of the study is that they can
discriminate all the sound of all languages no matter what country were tested
and what language were used.
We are culture-based
listeners, we can discriminate the sound of our own language but not those of
foreign languages. The citizens of the world turn into the language bound
listener is before their first birthdays. She also told about the performance
on the head turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and United States; as they
listened to “ra” and “la”, sounds important to English but not to Japanese. A
six to eight months the babies are totally equivalent. Two months later
something incredible occurs, the babies in the USA are getting a lot better
while babies in Japan are getting a lot worse. That two months of testing is
called as the critical period of sound
development. There are two things going on there. The
babies are listening intently to us and taking statistics as they listen
to talk. The statistic of English and Japanese are very different. English has
a lot of “R s and L s”. The distribution
shows babies absorb the statistic of language and it changes their brain for
the citizen of the world to the culture-bound listeners. Unlikely, adults are
no longer absorbing those statistics. Bilingual must keep two sets of
statistics in mind at once and flip between them.
Can the babies take
statistic on a brand new language? The study of babies who had never heard a
second language ( in this case Mandarin) for the first time during the critical
period when the monolingual was tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin
sound they showed the same pattern. Two months later something incredible
happens. Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies. The role
of human being played in this learning exercise. The social brain is controlled
when the babies are taking their statistics.
This time is the golden age
of knowledge about child’s brain development. In investigating the child’s
brain, we are going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be a human
and in the process we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning
for our entire lives.
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