<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline" style="visibility: visible;">Language Lessons Start in the Womb</h1>
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<p class="gmail-byline">By <span>
<a class="gmail-byline-author-link" href="https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/author/perri-klass-m-d/%20%20%20or%20https://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/columns/18_and_under/index.html?scp=1&sq=%22Perri%20Klass%22&st=cse" title="More Articles by PERRI KLASS, M.D."> <span class="gmail-byline-author">PERRI KLASS, M.D.</span>
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<time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2017-02-22T18:00:19-05:00">FEB. 21, 2017</time>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">New
research is teasing out more of the profoundly miraculous process of
language learning in babies. And it turns out that even more is going on
prenatally than previously suspected.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">By
looking at international adoptees — babies who were adopted soon after
birth and who grow up hearing a different language than what they heard
in the womb — researchers can see how what babies hear before and soon
after birth affects how they perceive sounds, giving new meaning to the
idea of a “birth language.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Experts
have known for some time that newborns prefer to listen to voices
speaking the language that they’ve been listening to in the womb, said
Anne Cutler, a psycholinguist who is a professor at the Marcs Institute
for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University, in
Australia.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Newborns
can recognize the voices they’ve been hearing for the last trimester in
the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers, and
prefer those voices to the voices of strangers. They also prefer other
languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with very
different rhythms. (Newborns indicated their preferences by how long
they sucked on specially rigged pacifiers that enabled them to hear one
speaker versus another, or one language versus another.)</p> <figure id="gmail-audio-100000004939863" class="embedded gmail-audio-jplayer gmail-media gmail-audio">
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<h4 class="gmail-headline">Dutch: tal <span class="gmail-duration">0:01</span></h4>
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<p class="gmail-summary">This is the Dutch word for amount. <span class="gmail-credit">Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington</span></p>
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<h4 class="gmail-headline">Korean: 달 <span class="gmail-duration">0:01</span></h4>
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<p class="gmail-summary">This is the Korean word for moon. <span class="gmail-credit">Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington</span></p>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Dr.
Cutler said the thinking used to be that babies didn’t actually learn
phonemes — the smallest units of sound that make up words and language,
that distinguish one word from another, as in “bag” and “tag” — until
the second six months of life.</p> <figure id="gmail-audio-100000004939852" class="embedded gmail-audio-jplayer gmail-media gmail-audio">
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<h4 class="gmail-headline">Korean: 탈 <span class="gmail-duration">0:01</span></h4>
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<p class="gmail-summary">This is the Korean word for mask. <span class="gmail-credit">Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington</span></p>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But new research, including the recent adoptee study, is challenging that notion.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In a 2010 TED Talk, , Dr. Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington described her experiments showing that <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies">as very young infants</a>,
babies are able to distinguish all the different sounds used in all the
world’s languages. But during the second half of their first year,
babies get better at distinguishing the sounds that are used in their
own languages, and lose the ability to distinguish the sounds they
aren’t hearing. Thus, a baby growing up hearing Japanese will lose the
ability to distinguish between “la” and “ra,” while a baby growing up
hearing Korean will retain the ability to distinguish three different
ways of pronouncing a sound like “tal” that has only one way of being
pronounced in Dutch.</p> <figure id="gmail-audio-100000004939859" class="embedded gmail-audio-jplayer gmail-media gmail-audio">
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<h4 class="gmail-headline">Korean: 딸 <span class="gmail-duration">0:01</span></h4>
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<p class="gmail-summary">This is the Korean word for daughter. <span class="gmail-credit">Dr. Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington</span></p>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In the latest <a href="http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/1/160660"> study, published in January in Royal Society Open Science, </a>
Jiyoun Choi, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, where Dr. Cutler was the director,
and her colleagues looked at Dutch-speaking adults, some of whom had
been adopted from Korea, but none of whom spoke Korean. The researchers
found that people born in Korea and adopted as babies or toddlers by
Dutch families were able to learn to make Korean sounds significantly
better than the Dutch-speaking controls who had been born into Dutch
families.</p> <a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/well/family/language-lessons-start-in-the-womb.html?mabReward=R6&recp=0&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Briefing®ion=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article#story-continues-1">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<p class="gmail-comment-text">Wondering about deaf Mothers. Would it take
longer for their children to develop lingual bonds with them? Longer
for their language skills...</p>
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<p class="gmail-comment-text">Talking to your baby is very important. I see
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on and on to another...</p>
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<h2 class="gmail-commenter">Turbot</h2>
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<p class="gmail-comment-text">Do we really know that sounds can be transmitted to a baby in utero?</p>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-2">It
was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who
had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been
saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months. In
other words, the language heard before birth and in the first months of
life had affected both sound perception and sound production, even
though the change of language environment happened before the children
started making those sounds themselves.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-3">Christine
Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University who also
studies infants and language acquisition, traces some of her own
interest in this subject to her experience as an adoptive mother. “My
children were adopted at birth, so they are cases of babies who had a
certain kind of experience right up until they were born and they did
not hear their birth mothers’ voices after they were born until much
later,” she said.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543479/">a study</a>
published in 2012, Dr. Moon and her associates showed that English and
Swedish newborns in the first day or two of life responded differently
to the vowel sounds used in their native language than they did to vowel
sounds from the other language. The researchers have also looked at
brain responses in newborns, and in a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373280/">study</a>
published in 2015, they showed that the babies’ brains could
distinguish the mother’s voice from a stranger’s voice in a single
second of speech — the word “baby” — but the single word was not a
sufficient reward to alter the babies’ sucking behavior.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“The
conclusion has always been under 6 months, they have no phonology, they
have no abstract knowledge about language,” Dr. Cutler said. But
recognizing that a phoneme is a particular sound, even as it occurs in
different places in different words, is abstract thinking, she
explained. So the research shows that even very early in life, babies’
brains are able to distinguish patterns of sound, and apply those rules
years later to the task of learning how to produce sounds that have not
been part of their daily speech.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“This
ability to generalize and to draw abstract conclusions across data is
the most important quality of the human mind,” Dr. Cutler said. “This is
what makes us human.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Babies
and children can learn new languages perfectly after birth; the
learning that goes on prenatally is still fascinating in elucidating the
processes of language and brain development. And we can help infant
brain development along naturally with the familiar rhythms of
parent-child interactions, back and forth, talking and singing and
reading aloud.</p></div></div><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“The
basic message to parents is don’t get too wrapped around the axle about
preparing your extremely young infant for language,” Dr. Moon said.
“Just do those things that are really natural and easy.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Talk
to your baby,” Dr. Cutler said. “Your baby is picking up useful
knowledge about language even though they’re not actually learning
words.” And your baby will like it: “It’s something they really love,
the social interaction of you talking with them, but they’re still
storing up useful knowledge whenever they hear speech.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">NYTimes 2/23/17<br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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