The Linguistic Gift of BabiesGood morning, everyone. In today's lecture, I'm going to talk about something you can't see. That is, what's going on in the little brain of a baby.For example, how babies learn a language.It is always a question people show great interest in.Babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline.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 studying the babies by conducting an experiment.During our experiment, the baby, usually a six-monther, sits on a parent's lap, and we 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. What have we learned?Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world".
