Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies. Please watch this Ted Talk and t
ID: 3448179 • Letter: P
Question
Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies. Please watch this Ted Talk and then answer the following questions. http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia kuhl the linguistic genius of babies/transcript?language entt 34951 1. Describe Kuhl's presentation from the perspective of nature and nurture as it relates to language development. What about the perspective of universal and context specific? 2. Discuss 2 or 3 elements from Kuhl's talk that would be of most interest to or best support Piaget's Theory. Do the same for Skinner's Theory of Behaviorism. 3. Find quotations from the talk that shows support for language learning to be both an experience dependent and experience expectant behavior. 4. Find quotations from the talk that reinforces each of the three theories on how human's develop language. 5. Discuss your thoughts in response to the research that shows that human interaction, even for brief periods, are more impactfal to language Think about the television shows that are designed to be educational or have an educational acquisition than television or recordings. component such as Dora the ExplorerExplanation / Answer
Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary. Also, I have mentioned the precise theories and Kuhl’s verbal report on the results below.
(Answer) (Question 4) Babies record language statistics based on the sounds. These mental statistics are then used to recognise language.
“04:14 - Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen, 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. English has a lot of Rs and Ls. The distribution shows. And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which 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 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.”
(2) Bilingual babies flip between two sets of statistics. This theory was tested on American babies with Mandarin and vice versa. Within the first 6 months, the response to both languages was the same. However, after two months, babies were able to recognise a different set of statistics.
“06:41 We had to run a control group to make sure that coming into the laboratory didn't improve your Mandarin skills. So a group of babies came in and listened to English. And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin. But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who'd been listening for 10 and a half months. What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language. Whatever you put in front of them, they'll take statistics on.”
(3) The third theory was that babies would absorb these statistics differently when a human person was speaking and different when a clip was played on audio or video. The babies stared at the teddy bear on screen or merely heard the audio without absorbing the speech statistics.
With the help of a magnetoencephalography, research was conducted on little Emma and her reaction to words she hears on her earphones.
“08:34
So this is little Emma. She's a six-monther. And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears. You can see, she can move around. We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap, so she's free to move completely unconstrained. It's a technical tour de force. What are we seeing? We're seeing the baby brain. 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.”
The babies preference to human speech as opposed to audio or video is because the social brain helps the baby comprehend these language statistics.