Look Who's Talking-In Two Languages

[Harold Schiffman]

Forwarded From edling at lists.sis.utsa.edu


UTSA Discovery

Look Who's Talking-In Two Languages

To 9-month-old Warren*, a visit to the UTSA baby lab must have seemed
like child's play. As he wiggled and fussed on his mom's lap,
researcher Sophia Ortiz waved plastic toys in front of his face. A
Barney video played silently in the background. A visiting professor
placed a funny cap on his head. What looked from the outside like
child's play was actually serious science.

The stretchy knit "pilot cap" Warren wore featured 19 sewn-in sensors
dotting the surface, each filled with conducting gel. The sensors
began picking up and amplifying a record of Warren's brain responses
to sounds from a machine, and soon waves of squiggly lines began
appearing on a nearby computer screen. After about 20 minutes, the
electroencephalogram (EEG) recording was over, but the study of Warren
and his brain was just beginning.

Warren was one of 30 children recruited by UTSA sociologists in fall
2005 to participate in an ambitious project studying language
acquisition in children growing up in bilingual environments. The
project brings together sociologists, neuroscientists and educators
from UTSA and the University of Washington's Institute for Learning
and Brain Sciences in a multiyear collaboration. The aim of the
research is to study the development of the bilingual brain using the
methods of both the neuroscientist and the social scientist.



Full story:

http://www.utsa.edu/discovery/f_baby_p1.htm

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