Babies’ Language Skills

Babies are able to differentiate minute sound distinctions that would otherwise be lost to adults, University of Washington professor of speech and hearing sciences Patricia K. Kuhl said on Tuesday.

“The hope is that if you have a biomarker for any of these disabilities, you could go in and do something about atypical learning patterns and change the trajectory of a child’s life,” she said.

Kuhl also discussed an experiment that proved the importance social context plays in early child language acquisition. “The more social behavior that took place during the sessions, the better learning the babies had on the phonetic level,” Kuhl said.

Kuhl further explained that babies commit the architecture of native language sound properties to propel rapidly to perceptions of foreign languages.

She said that the phonetic discriminations of a seven-month-year-old child predicted the reading skills of that child at age five.

“What children are doing early in locking onto sounds of language is a profound measurement of future learning,” Kuhl said.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/4/professor-foreign-language-babies/