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"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 85
Language and Developmental Sensitivities (2)
Phonetic
Phonetic
There are developmental sensitivities (the windows of learning opportunity) as language circuits are most receptive to particular experience-dependent modifications at certain stages of the individual’s development.
Newborns are born with an ability to discern subtle phonetic changes along a continuous range, but experience with a particular language in the first ten months renders the brain sensitive to sounds relevant to that language (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999). For example, the consonant sounds r and l occur along a continuous spectrum, and all newborns hear the sounds this way.
The brains of babies immersed in an English-speaking environment, however, are gradually modified to perceive this continuous spectrogram as two distinct categories, r and l. A prototypical representation of each phoneme is developed, and incoming sounds are matched to these representations and sorted as either r or l.
Babies immersed in a Japanese-speaking environment, by contrast, do not form these prototypes as this distinction is not relevant to Japanese. Instead, they form prototypes of sounds relevant to Japanese, and actually lose the ability to discriminate between r and l by ten months of age. This phenomenon occurs for varied sound distinctions across many languages (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999).
Therefore, the brain is optimally suited to acquire the sound prototypes of languages to which it is exposed in the first ten months from birth.
Newborns are born with an ability to discern subtle phonetic changes along a continuous range, but experience with a particular language in the first ten months renders the brain sensitive to sounds relevant to that language (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999). For example, the consonant sounds r and l occur along a continuous spectrum, and all newborns hear the sounds this way.
The brains of babies immersed in an English-speaking environment, however, are gradually modified to perceive this continuous spectrogram as two distinct categories, r and l. A prototypical representation of each phoneme is developed, and incoming sounds are matched to these representations and sorted as either r or l.
Babies immersed in a Japanese-speaking environment, by contrast, do not form these prototypes as this distinction is not relevant to Japanese. Instead, they form prototypes of sounds relevant to Japanese, and actually lose the ability to discriminate between r and l by ten months of age. This phenomenon occurs for varied sound distinctions across many languages (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999).
Therefore, the brain is optimally suited to acquire the sound prototypes of languages to which it is exposed in the first ten months from birth.
"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 85
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