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=en#t-34951.

3. Find quotations from the talk that shows support for language learning to be both an experience dependent and experience expectant behavior.

Answer 1

Experience expectant behaviour can be defined as the necessary inputs provided by the infant's environment for the infant to develop neural connections which enable the infant to function across the domains. If the infant does not receive these inputs during the critical period, these functions will be lost.

These quotes from the TED talk show Experience Expectant Behaviour

• The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map.

Reason: It is because if we do not receive certain environmental inputs during the critical periods these functions are lost.

• Babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world." They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using.

Reason: It is because the brain receives all the environmental inputs in the critical age. That is why, babies can identify all the sounds.

• 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.

Reason: Since the brain received the environmental inputs during the critical period, the functions were not lost and the babies were able to grasp both the language sounds

Experience dependent behaviour can be defined as the additional functional neural connections development depending solely upon the quality of environmental input.

These quotes from the TED talk show Experience Dependent Behaviour

• What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to "ra" and "la" -- sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible occurs. The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn.

Reason: The brain tries to strengthen neural networks depending upon the quality of input received. Since, the babies hear their mother tongue more often, they strengthen those pathways.

• 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.

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