Babies and Language

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Fraggle Rocker, Dec 3, 2009.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    As reported in the Washington Post, babies begin to learn elements of their parents' language as soon as they're exposed to it.

    A study of French and German newborns discovered that with a few days of birth, when French babies cry they begin at a low pitch and finish high, while German babies do just the opposite. This correlates exactly with the phonetics of the two languages: Virtually all French words are accented on the last syllable, while most German words carry the accent on the first syllable.

    It's very likely that this acculturation begins in utero, since hearing is the first sense that develops. Even through the muddle of the amniotic fluid babies have been shown to react to noises and sense their mother's voice. Human babies are born at a lower stage of development than any other mammal because otherwise the head would be too big to fit through the birth canal, so the only elements of language they can reproduce at birth are pitch and volume.

    The researchers hypothesized that newborns may be motivated to imitate their mother's behavior in order to get her attention and begin bonding.

    I wonder whether the answer is this: Babies have a speech center in their brains which is used for sending and receiving communication, and they're anxious to start using it.
     
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  3. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I think Chomsky (or some other linguist) claimed that infants are born with some hard wired functions which enable them to learn to use language.

    Evidence supporting the above (I believe) included a claim that early infant grammar is the same even though grammatical constructs of various languages are dissimilar.

    Example include word order. Some languages (English, for example) usually use Subject-noun, verb, object-noun order, while other languages do not. It was claimed that infants initially used the same word order even when the adult language used a different order.

    Considering the difficulty of the task of learning a language, it seems that infants must have some special built-in capabilities.
     
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