In another example of how children have time windows of developmental plasticity and learning, Weikum et al. (PDF here) show that 4 to 6 month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task. This indicates that infants are prepared very early for visual language discrimination, but loose this ability once they begin to learn a single language. Through experience adults can regain this sensitivity, for they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Infants distinguish languages by just looking at a talking face
In another example of how children have time windows of developmental plasticity and learning, Weikum et al. (PDF here) show that 4 to 6 month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task. This indicates that infants are prepared very early for visual language discrimination, but loose this ability once they begin to learn a single language. Through experience adults can regain this sensitivity, for they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment