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The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and…
Believe it or not, it is only relatively recently that scientists have begun to appreciate the importance of babies' earliest motor activity. In the first part of this century, most researchers championed the view that motor development is largely innate, or "hard-wired." Struck by the remarkable consistency of skill…
Beginning about four months of age, the perception of detail takes another leap forward with the emergence of hyperacuity: the ability to discriminate features that are up to ten times finer than the size of the photoreceptors should theoretically permit. It is this ultrafine discrimination that allows us, for…
One reason why researchers have had such a hard time replicating the composition of breast milk is that it isn't a fixed commodity. No two women's milk is identical, nor is the composition of any one mother's milk constant at all times; it varies with the amount of time that has elapsed postpartum, gradually changing…
In the case of a mother's more general nutritional status—her tota caloric intake—the brain is actually less sensitive during the first three to four months of gestation. In spite of its massive developmental changes, the fetus grows surprisingly little in size during this period, so its growth is not very dependent…
As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies' speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture. Pat conducted some even more complicated experiments with Swedish babies…
We think there are very strong similarities between some particular types of early learning—learning about objects and about the mind, in particular—and scientific theory change. In fact, we think they are not just similar but identical. We don't just think that the baby computers have the same general structure as…
Until very recently doctors didn't use analgesia when they operated on small babies, because they thought their minds were too primitive to really feel pain or to remember it if they did. This is a dramatic example, but it often seems as if we discount children's pain compared with adult pain. Child abuse isn't evil…
Babies start out believing that there are profound similarities between their own mind and the minds of others. That belief gives them a jump start in solving the Other Minds problem. But during the first three years they also observe the differences in what people do and say. Those differences stem from the fact that…
When a three-month-old, a one-year-old, and a four-year-old look at the same event, they seem to have very different thoughts about it. They seem to transform the light waves and sound waves into different representations, and they use different rules to manipulate those representations. Children don't have just a…
The tests show that babies' preferences have nothing to do with the actual words mothers use. Babies choose motherese (or "parentese" or "caretakerese") even when the speaker is talking in a foreign language so infants can't understand the words, or when the words have been filtered out using computer techniques and…
Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what'sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-monthold baby will…
Why do the speakers of different languages hear and produce sounds so differently? Ears and mouths are the same the world over. What differs is our brains. Exposure to a particular language has altered our brains and shaped our minds, so that we perceive sounds differently. This in turn leads speakers of different…
We mentioned that part of what makes learning language difficult is that languages carve up sounds and different Ianguages carve them up differently. A wide variety of different sounds, with very different spectrograms, will all seem like the same sound to us, and, in turn, that sound will seem sharply different from…
It turns out that, just by the nature of the grammar of their languages, Korean- and English-speaking parents talk about the world quite differently. Korean (like Latin or French) uses an elaborate system of different verb endings to convey different meanings. As a consequence, Korean-speaking parents can, and often…
However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there…
As scientists we think that everything is mediated by physical causality of some sort, including our interactions with other people. There are, in fact, light and sound waves that go from one person to another even if we can't see them with the naked eye. But from our everyday point of view, it appears we are able to…
1. If you show very young babies a video of a static Big Bird that then explodes into its separately defined parts, they won't be perturbed. Because all the parts had separate edges anyway, they may, for all the babies know. have been separate objects to begin with. But if you show them Big Bird moving first, so that…
But we also have some more direct evidence for the idea that children learn like scientists. Alison and Virginia Slaughter, one of her students, looked at three-year-old children who didn't yet fully understand belief—children who still said they had always thought that there were pencils in the candy box. Then, over…
Children's discoveries about belief also have consequences for other aspects of their relations to people. To deceive peopie, or to recognize that they are deceiving you, you need to be able to understand the differences between what they believe and what you believe. Doing that depends on understanding the way…