UESCenglishQUEST is part of the resources provided by the staff of the extension project Making the teaching of English more dynamic at UESC. You are welcome to interact with us. Join us! Esse blog faz parte do projeto de extensão Dinamizando o ensino da língua inglesa na UESC. Sintam-se à vontade para interagir com os recursos oferecidos aqui. Juntem-se a nós!
Patricia Kuhl is co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. She's internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and studies that show how young children learn. Kuhl’s work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the brain. It has implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for developmental disabilities involving language, and for research on computer understanding of speech.
In the following video, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world. Patricia Kuhl studies how we learn language as babies, looking at the ways our brains form around language acquisition.
Patricia Kuhl: The Linguistic genius of babies (with Portuguese subtitles)
"Babies all over the world are what I like to describe as ‘citizens of the world.’ They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we’re testing and what language we’re using.” (Patricia Kuhl)
*All the information for this blogpost was taken directly from TED.com.
