Video - Brain & Language Development in Infancy

Brain Development in Infancy

From infancy on, the brain and mind, the neural hardware and cognitive software of an infant develop together. At birth the limbic areas are quite immature, and the cortex is almost entirely underdeveloped. The neurons are there, but the connections among them have not been established. It is the experiences that children have that allow new synaptic connections to be made. Some people estimate that a million connections per second are made in the cortex in the first six months of life.

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. (Filmed at TEDxRainier.) Talk by Patricia Kuhl.