Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

http://www.ted.com At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

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Science & Technology

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• Kuhl
• TEDTalks
• TED
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• language
• learning
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• children
• linguistics
• babies
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• statistics

[tdietz20]

@dushevka hey, way to congratulate yourself and throw in jab at Americans/Chinese. Your modest admission that you're not super-human was hilariously transparent. Nowhere in this presentation was it suggested that multilingualism was a miracle. It was only suggesting how much easier it is for young children than it is for adults. This doesn't imply that it's impossible for adults. Just because you're good at picking up language doesn't mean this research isn't important and useful.

[djryce]

@dushevka

You have to take into account that a lot of European languages come from the same family. For example, if you speak Spanish, it's not hard to pick up Italian, French, Romanian, or Portuguese just from immersion. There's not a lot of distance to cover between those countries, and the language structure is pretty similar.

It's another story for a native English speaker learning Korean or an Arabic speaker learning Russian. So try not to be such a dick.

[gewraldruzkalukaniuk]

@dcdales really as people get wiser they realize it is better to use one language well.unless they are translators.

[gewraldruzkalukaniuk]

@djryce European languages have been rraced back to an ancient lanuage called Rusyn . Last remanents spoke it in the Carpathian mountains. My dad spoke it and it was wiped out by the communists. Legendary symbolism is contained in the words and the family names and commies want to rewrite history. Root of all human languages was founfd in a valley I beleive in Uzbeckstan leads credence to the legend that the whole world spoke one language.

[andreeaweed]

i really think this is so true ...i agree with

[127miles]

I'm trilingual, English, Spanish, German. I learned Spanish not from class but from living in chile. I had to learn German in class. But ya i don't believe I'm really tha much smarter

[dcdales]

I disagree with the arch of language acquisition ability. In showing the trends of language acquisition ability over age as a line graph, it really takes away from the idea of variation. I bet there is an incredible amount of variation in language acquisition ability over age.

Dedication, interest, and amount of free time are probably the highest determinants of acquisition of a new language. For a baby, these three points are freakin' high, bro!

[Armuotas]

Interesting talk, and the baby in the "MEG" device is hillarious :)

[keemnal]

@2528997 India is more diverse than you think ;-)

[2528997]

1:04 that mother and baby look nothing like they're from India