[lit-ideas] Re: Amazing babies

Paul Stone wrote:

On 5/27/07, *Robert Paul* wrote:

      Recently, scientists have learned the following:


        * At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue
          from a foreign one.
But the then the article goes on to talk about 4 MONTH old babies. This is HARDLY "a few days old". Of course, maybe the definition of a 'few' has changed since I was a kid. I know a lot of people use 'a couple' to mean what a few used to mean. Personally, I would say 120 days is 'many' more than just a few.
The line about few-day-old infants picking out their native language from a foreign one came from a story for non-specialists (forwarded by Julie), which appeared on the site ScienceLive (sciencelive.com). The full list of what scientists 'have learned' was 

   * At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue from a
     foreign one.
   * At 4 or 5 months, infants can lip read, matching faces on silent
     videos to "ee" and "ah" sounds.
   * Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages
     on Earth, and they can hear the difference between foreign
     language sounds that elude most adults.
   * Infants in their first six months can tell the difference between
     two monkey faces that an older person would say are identical, and
     they can match calls that monkeys make with pictures of their faces.
   * Infants are rhythm experts
     <http://www.livescience.com/health/050603_bouncing_babies.html>,
     capable of differentiating between the beats of their culture and
     another.
I carelessly thought that the first item was simply a short version of the finding that 'infants just 4 months old can tell whether someone is speaking in their native tongue or not without any sound, just by watching a silent movie of their speech,' an ability which disappears by the age of 8 months, unless the child grows up in a bilingual environment and therefore needs to use the skill. But obviously this was a new finding, not included in the bulleted list which preceded it.
This is the finding Judy was struck by, and the Science paper I forwarded deals with it, not the bulleted item from the list in the ScienceLive article, with which I confused it. 

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute

Other related posts: