New insights into how babies learn language
Barinaga, M.
Science 277(5326): 641
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 9254430 Document Number: 477480
Two recent studies shed some new light on how babies master which subtle phonetic differences to pay attention to and which ones to ignore in speech. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues report in this issue that the singsong type of speech people use when talking to babies may be more than just a tool of endearment. Kuhl says that the exaggerated and varied "caricatures" of vowel sounds help infants learn the key features of sounds. In the second study, reported in the July 24 Nature, Christine Stager and Janet Werker at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver find that when infants start to learn words, they neglect some differences between sounds. It is likely that this is because those distinctions will not matter until later, when their vocabulary contains more similar-sounding words.