[TED.COM] by Patricia Kuhl "The linguistic genius of babies"

 summary

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. Patricia Kuhl works in her lab that 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. When babies are  listening, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear, and those distributions grow. And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. The babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are, but we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development. When monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate. In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.