It’s sometimes difficult to understand what babies want. They cannot do simple physical activities such
as walking and talking. But recent research tells us that they acquire language skills long before they
even say any word! And they get these skills faster than adults.
Humans have a harder time trying to learn new languages as they age but babies have the skill to learn
any language even the ones that aren’t real. For long researchers have tried hard to explain how babies
at such a young age can memorize the difficult grammatical rules and the voice needed to communicate
in words.
Now, Scientists have somewhat of a better idea of what’s going on in the heads of the smallest learners
that we live among. The understanding might help children that have problems in learning as well as
adults in time. The research might even help scientists that are trying to build computers that are
designed to talk like humans. co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and
Brain Science Patricia Kuhl says babies brains have new boundaries.
The Learning Process For decades, scientists have debated how young children's brains discover how to
communicate using language. With the help of new technologies and research strategies, scientists are
now discovering that infants begin their lives with the ability to learn any language. By interacting with
others and using their excellent listening and observational skills, they quickly master the specific
languages they hear most often. “[Babies] brains are really flexible,” says Rebecca Gomez, an
experimental psychologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Newborns "can't talk much, but they
learn a lot: Kuhl's research, for example, shows that the progression from babble like 'gaga' to real
words like 'hello' begins with the ability to say hello to babies." ability to distinguish between simple
sounds, such as “ga; “Three; "And" skin: · Studies like these show that, until about six months of age,
babies can recognize all the sounds that make up all the languages in the world. “The ability to do this
shows [infants] are ready to learn any language,” says Kuhl. "That's why we call them 'citizens of the
world':
About 6,000 sounds make up the languages spoken in the world, but not all languages use all of them.
For example, while the Swedish language distinguishes 16 vowels, English uses only eight and Japanese
uses only five.Adults can only hear sounds used in the language they know. For example, to a native
Japanese speaker, the letters "R" and "T" look the same. So, unlike someone whose native language is
English, a Japanese speaker cannot distinguish "row" from "bottom" or "scratch" from "lake:" said Kuhl,
from about six months As children age, their brains focus on things in common. the sound it hears. After
that, children begin to respond only to the sounds of the language they hear most. Likewise, Gomez
found that slightly older babies begin to recognize the patterns that make up the rules in their native
language. In English, for example, children around 18 months old begin to understand that words that
end in "ing" or "ed" are usually verbs and verbs are action words. Language on the brain Scientists are
particularly interested in the brains of people who are fluent in more than one language, because this
skill is difficult to acquire after about seven years of age. For example, in one study by Kuhl, native
Mandarin speakers spoke Chinese to nine-month-old American infants for twelve sessions over four
weeks. Each session lasts about 25 minutes. At the end of the study, American infants responded to the
sounds of Mandarin just as much as Chinese infants who had heard the language all their lives.
(English-speaking teenagers and adults won't do well either.)
If a child regularly hears two languages, their brain will form a different route for each. However, once
the brain solidifies these electrical pathways around age 7, it becomes more difficult to form new ones.
At this point, the baby's brain has eliminated, 3, or cut off all the unnecessary connections the baby was
born with. So if you didn't start learning Spanish or Russian before college, you've struggled with years
of brain development, and progress can be daunting. A 12-year-old's brain has to work harder to form
language connections than a newborn baby's brain. “We should learn a new language between the ages
of 0 and 7, when the brain does it naturally,” says Kuhl. . On the other hand, researchers have found that
language learners are much better at conversing with speakers of that language than relying on
educational CDs and DVDs with recorded conversations. Kuhl discovered that when infants watched
someone speaking a foreign language on television, they had a completely different experience than
when they watched the same speaker in real life. With real speakers, babies' brains light up with
electrical activity when they hear sounds they've learned. “The kids were watching TV and they were
hypnotized,” says Kuhl. However, the learning did not take place. “Nothing happens in their brains: · she
said. “Absolutely nothing. »