08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Categorize Sounds Before Words
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 using simple vowels to see how early they start organizing the sounds of their language in an adult-like way. She showed that at six months the process has already begun. The six...Babies learn the sounds of their language, which gives them the ability to distinguish and categorize words later on.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Can Predict Trajectories
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 they see that all the parts of the object move together, and then show them the exploding Big Bird, they'll look much longer and more attentively, as if they recognize that somet...If an object moving at a trajectory disappears behind a screen, the baby will look longer at the other end of the screen if it does not reappear at the proper time and place.