The Babbling Stage of Infancy
It is interesting and perhaps surprising to realize that most mammals lack a capacity for complex vocal learning of this sort. Current research suggests that aside from humans, only marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals), bats, and elephants have it. Among primates, humans appear to be the only species that can hear new sounds in the environment and then reproduce them. Our ability to do this seems to depend on a babbling stage during infancy, a period of vocal playfulness as instinctual as...
notesW. Tecumseh Fitch describes the link between infant vocalizations and the ability of humans to vocalize extensively. This links to Chomsky's speech-center of the human brain.
Kangaroo Care and Infant Massage
In the old days, extensive parental contact was discouraged because of fears about injury or infection. Now, however, some hospitals are encouraging parents to spend up to several hours a day holding their preterm infants, preferably upright and skin-to-skin against their bare chest. This approach has been dubbed "kangaroo care" because of its resemblance to early-life marsupials, which are born prematurely but kept warm and nourished in the maternal pouch.
Studies have shown several advant...
1 A technique for helping a preterm infant to regulate their body heat and a daily exercise for stimulating the infant to improve its cognition and responsiveness.
What Newborns Hear and Learn in the Womb
Another experiment, however, proves that babies really do imprint on auditory experiences while still in the womb. In this case, mothers were asked to read a particular story aloud, twice a day, during the last six weeks of pregnancy. The story was by Dr. Seuss again, this time The Cat in the Hat, and it was estimated that the babies spent a total of about five hours listening to it in the womb. Shortly after birth, they were tested to see whether they preferred listening to their mothers rea... notesThe mother's voice, stories read to them, and sounds from their environment; with the exception of the father's voice, to which the infant grows habituated very soon after birth.
Scientists Emulate 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 the adult-scientist computers, in the way that perceptual learning and artistic learning and political learning may all have the same general structure. We think that children ...We have even institutionalized an environment of infancy for scientists in academia, where they are allowed to explore freely in general research, understanding that the discoveries made there may hold great benefits for the human race. This meme also suggests that free inquiry is an important aspect of raising children and maintaining an environment of free inquiry for parents is important as well.
Looking at babies attentively makes us treat them differe...
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 because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children. Divorce doesn't have a cost because it may produce adults who have difficulty with relationships but because...Seeing babies as young adults makes us treat them humanely; whereas, in the past, babies were denied analgesia because it was thought that their primitive minds did not sense pain the way an adult's mind did.
Children Learn New Languages More Easily Than Adults
Other, less tragic kinds of evidence also support this idea. Most people have a much more difficult time learning a second language late in life than they do in childhood. Immigrants may try to learn the language of their new country, only to be outdone by their own children. When we visit a foreign country for a while, our kids seem to be happily chatting with the other kids in the playground, while we are still painfully looking through the phrase books. When we learn a second language past... notesIt is best to teach someone a new language when they are young and their brain is more plastic.
Babies Learn The Sounds of Their Language
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 other sounds that are actually quite similar to it physically. Suppose you use a speech synthesizer to gradually and continuously change one particular feature of a sound, such a... notesWhen a language does not make a clear distinction between two sounds, the children of that language cannot hear the distinction in other languages.
Mother-Baby Social Play
But there is more to the interaction than a matter of adults putting on i a show. When babies and adults interact, they are partners in an interactive social dance in which they jointly regulate each other, and this dance is essential for the baby's social and psychological development Renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton noticed in his practice that babies and mothers seem to follow a typical pattern of play, a synchronized score that moves from attention to nonattention with both partne...How babies actively seek to engage with mothers socially, connecting with them.
Physiological Effects of Cosleeping with Infants
when they are more used to sleeping alone, sleep differently when with when they are more used to sleeping alone, sleep differently when with their mothers. The babies seem to spend a greater percentage of their sleep time in levels 1-2 and less time at the deeper levels, exhibit more REM sleep, and are awake longer. In other words, they are more often moving among sleep levels, and they sleep lighter.
Christopher Richard, Mosko, and McKenna have also found that most co-sleeping pairs spend ...How cosleeping effects an infant's progression through sleep, with the mother guiding it through the cycles.
Shortening a Baby's Crying Duration
What seems to work best is simple human contact. Peter Wolff long ago demonstrated that picking up a baby works better than anything else to stop any baby from crying. In another study, infant researchers BeU and Ainsworth showed in the 1970s, with a sample of twenty-six infants, that consistent and prompt response by the infant's mother is associated with a decrease in the duration of infant crying. Urs Hunziker and Ronald Barr recently took this idea even further when they experimented with...Nothing works better than carrying the baby and responding quickly to its needs.
