Summary of 'The Linguistic Genius of Babies' by Patricia Kuhl

Patricia Kuhl tells about a mother in India speaks Koro which is a newly-discovered language. She is talking to her baby. What this mother and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world understand that to preserve this language they need to speak it to the babies because babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven years old. The first critical period in development is the period where babies master which sound is used in their language. There are two things going on during the critical two month period, the first is that the babies are listening intently to us and they are taking statistics as they listen to us talk. Babies are sensitive to the statistics. For example, two mothers speaking motherese to the kids, English and Japanese. So, when babies listen, the babies are taking statistics on the language that they hear. The statistics of Japanese and English is very different. English has a lot of R and L. Whereas the group of intermediates sounds in Japanese is known as the Japanese R. So, 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. American and Japanese babies show that there is a critical 2 month period around 8 to 10 months babies. At 6 to 8 months both American and Japanese babies have similar score on performance on English sounds but when they are 10 to 12 months the American babies perform better than the Japanese. We are going able to see the child’s brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they have an idea. And we are going to be able to invent brain based interventions for children who have difficulty learning. In investigating the child’s brain, we are 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.