Some information about babies and linguistics

http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-02-16&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

If this not works, search for speaker Patricia Kuhl (The linguistic genius of babies)

Pretty interesting talk, by the way you can go to www.tinyurl.com to shorten the link, which is easier and you’d get this:

http://tinyurl.com/6crgbp3

I do wonder about what she is saying about babies being able to learn languages very easily and how our language learning capacity decreases with age. I guess they measured how a little exposure to a language would increase their comprehension, but I’m not a huge fan of people saying that babies or small children can pick up languages easily and naturally, as opposed to adults who need to work very hard for it.

Babies have as their sole goal and interest discovering the world around them and learning how communicate with other people through a language. Furthermore they have a team of language teachers at their disposal 24/7.

I’d like to see an adult whose only responsibility and activity is learning a new language while everything else gets taken care of by others and a team of language teachers is at his disposal 24/7 for three or four years.

My guess is that in such a case the adult would learn very quickly as well, but of course adults are usually never able to recreate such a language learning environment as what they had when they were babies/toddlers.

So the underlying message of the video seems to be:

Babies are language geniuses and older people might as well not even bother trying, unless they’re willing to work extremely hard.