Newborn babies and their tongues
Babies as young as 42 minutes were videotaped as an adult stuck out their tongue, The
babies copied the action, showing that they not only knew they had a tongue, but that the
tongue the adult was sticking out was the same as what they had in their mouths.
Language differences
People assume babies learn language when they try to say their first words. But these
researchers showed that babies aged just a few months are already starting to distinguish
between languages.
By playing noises and monitoring which the babies reacted to, they found that
one-month-olds are happy listening to any language but at some point between six and 12
months they begin to respond better to the sounds they hear around them. They are,
effectively, learning language rules. Canadian six-month-old babies could discriminate
Hindi speech sounds that Canadian adults can’t hear. By 12 months they no longer can.
Japanese and American seven-month-olds could hear the difference between r and l even
though Japanese adults cannot. By ten months the Japanese children could no longer hear
the difference but American children had actually got better at distinguishing between the
two sounds.
They also found that between a year and 18 months, babies begin to babble in the style of
their own community – a Chinese baby sounds Chinese, a Swedish baby sounds Swedish
– they were actually compared to the noise of the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show!
Broccoli and crackers
Babies were shown two bowls of food, one full of crackers and one full of broccoli. All
the babies preferred the crackers. The tester then tasted each food making a delighted
face and saying "yum" to one food and making a disgusted face and saying yuck to
the other. Then she held out the bowls to the babies, held out her hand and said:
"Can you give me some?"
When she said she loved crackers and hated broccoli, all babies gave her crackers.
When she said she loved broccoli and hated crackers, 14-month-old babies, who assume
that we all want the same thing, gave her the crackers that they themselves prefer.
But 18-month-old babies gave her the broccoli despite their preference for crackers. In
those four months, they had learned that people have desires and those desires are not
always the same as the baby’s wants.
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