The
Linguistic Genius of Babies
By
Patricia Kuhl
Patricia Kuhl is co-director of the Institute for Brain and
Learning Science at the University of Washington. The modern tools of neuroscience
are demonstrating to them that what’s going on up there is nothing short of
rocket science. And what they’re learning is going to shed some light on what
the romantic writers and poets described as the “celestial openness” of the
child’s mind.
An Indian mother who is
speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language. She is talking to her
baby. What this mother and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world
understand that, to preserve that language, they need to speak it to the
babies. And therein lies a critical puzzle. Why is it that they can’t preserve
a language by speaking to the adults? Obviously, language has a critical period
for learning.
The babies and children
are geniuses until they turn seven, and there’s a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map. No scientists
dispute this curve, yet. But laboratories all over the world are trying to
figure out why it works this way.
She works on her lab
which is focused on the first critical period in development, that is the
period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their
language. They have been studying the babies
using a technique that people are using all over the world and the sounds of
all languages. The baby sits on a parent’s lap, they train them to turn their heads when a sound changes,
like from “ah” to “ee”. If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box
lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum.
So they have learned
that, babies all over the world are like “citizens of the world”. They can
discriminate all the sounds of all languages which adults can’t do. So, when do
those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we
are?, the answer is, before their first birthdays.
The head-turn task
also tested by babies in Tokyo and US, in Seattle, as they listened to
“ra” and “la”, which is important sound to English but not to Japanese. So, at
six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent. Something incredible
occurs in two months later, the US babies are getting a lot better instead of
Japanese babies who are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies
are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn.
What’s happening during
that critical two-month period? That is the critical period for sound development.
So there are two things going on; the babies are listening intently to them and
they are taking statistics as they listen to them.
During the production
of speech, babies are taking statistics on the language that they hear while
they are listening, and those distributions grow. Babies are sensitive to the
statistics. they are getting better in taking statistics on a brand new
language if they are accostumated by the environment and people who intensively
transfered the language to them. It happens to the American and Taiwanese
babies who were tested.
That is also happens to
Emma, a six-monther who is listening to various languages in the earphones. As
the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas on her brain light
up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it are related to coherence,
getting the brain coordinated with its different areas and causality, one brain
area causing another to activate.
We are embarking on a
grand and golden age of knowledge about child’s brain development. We are going
to be able to see a child’s brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn
to speak and read, solve a math problem, as they have an idea. And we are going to able to invent
brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning. As the
poets and writers described, we are going to be able to see that wondrous
openness, utter and complete openness of the mind’s child. In investigating the
child’s brain, we are 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.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar