The linguistic genius of babies - Patricia Kuhl
Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world. (Filmed at TEDxRainier.)
Talk by Patricia Kuhl.
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Video Transcript
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
I want you to take a look at this baby
what you're drawn to are her eyes and
the skin you love to touch but today I'm
going to talk to you about something you
can't see what's going on up in that
little brain of her
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'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 what we see here is a mother in
India and she's speaking cororo which is
a newly discovered language and she's
talking to her baby what this mother and
the 800 people who speak cororo in the
world understand that it to preserve
this language they need to speak it to
the babies and therein lies a critical
puzzle why is it that you can't preserve
a language by speaking to you and I to
the adults well it's got to do with your
brain what we see here is that language
has a critical period for learning the
way to read this slide is to look at
your age on the horizontal
axis you've done that and you'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 no
scientists dispute this curve but
Laboratories all over the world are
trying to figure out why it works this
way work in my lab is focused on the
first critical period in development and
that is the period in which babies try
to master which sounds are used in their
language we think 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
