[lit-ideas] Re: Amazing babies
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 05:34:49 -0500
On 5/27/07, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Recently, scientists have learned the following:
- At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue from a
foreign one.
---------------------------
Science 25 May 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5828, p. 1159
DOI: 10.1126/science.1137686
Thanks, Robert. That is truly fascinating. What, I wonder, does it mean
that infants are initially more attuned to visual cues than aural cues? I
remember reading something quite some time back which said that infants
could tell the difference between their father's hand and someone else's at
just a couple days of age. The "concentration" thing as a means of
determining infants' perceptions of sensory cues -- sight, touch, hearing --
has always seemed unstable to me. But if it's good enough for the
scientists, I guess it's good enough for me <g>. When I read studies like
this, it raises questions for me about how the brain functions, how
cognitive processing works. I particularly think about people with autism,
people with the so-called "idiot savant" syndrome (there's a more
politically correct term these days, but I can't recall what it is). For
example -- the brilliant autistic woman who talks, via voice-recognition
software, interacting with the water -- it seems from her piece that she has
retained the sharp awareness of touch and vision that is described re. the
infants, but that some of the elements of speech, the ability to speak, are
not intact. I would love to see someone do a study on the perceptions of
infants and then follow those infants to adulthood and make some
comparisons. I wonder what scientists make of the lessening of the visual
detection and the increase of the aural as the infants grow. And what might
this mean about teaching infants according to "age abilities"? Does the
shift in cuing result from the kind of stimulus the infant receives (i.e.,
Mommy talking to the baby alot), or is it a given no matter what kind of
environment early infancy experiences? I think of infants in orphanages or
other situations in which human contact is much more limited than is usual
in a family environment. And then I start wondering.... oh never mind.
This is what happens when I wake up at 5:30 a.m. This is what happens. Ish.
Julie Krueger
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