Languages and Infants

This article mainly talked about new discoveries in language and how infants and even babies still in the womb process and learn language. Most people know that babies in the womb can hear and recognize their mother's voice, however recent studies have also shown that babies prefer both voices and rhythms similar to their mothers or to other voices they've heard a lot of over the last trimester. For the longest time it was thought that babies couldn't or didn't learn phonemes until the second 6 months of their life. But recently, different studies have shown that babies are capable of understanding every different sound used in all of the languages around the world. Basically, babies start with the ability to understand all of these sounds, then over time only pay attention to the ones used in the language around them and lose the ability to pronounce the others. This point lead into another study which showed that Korean babies that were adopted into Dutch families were able to pronounce and learn Korean words much better than people who had just been born into a Dutch family.

I found just about every part of this article interesting in some way. I knew babies could recognize their mother's voice but thought it had something to do more with the tone or pitch, not necessarily the rhythm of it. The idea that babies are able to understand every different sound used in all of the languages around the world is fascinating and something I had never heard before. At the same time, I could see how this would make sense, especially after reading about the Korean babies being adopted into Dutch families but still being able to learn and pronounce Korean words better than people born into Dutch families. Overall, I think language in babies and children is an extremely interesting topic that I'd like to learn more about. 

Source:

Klass, Perri. (2017, February 21). Language Lessons Start in the Womb. New York Times. Retrieved: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/well/family/language-lessons-start-in-the-womb.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FLanguage%20and%20Languages&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection&_r=0