The new highly-acclaimed book by NY Times best-selling author Po Bronson (with Ashely Merryman) expands on earlier language theories.
From "NurtureShock":
"...Kuhl (Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington) went on to discover that babies' brains do not learn to recognize foreign-language phonemes off a videotape or audiotape -- at all.
They absolutely do learn from a live, human teacher.
In fact, babies' brains are so sensitive to live human speech that Kuhl was able to train American babies to recognize Mandarin phonemes (which they'd never heaerd before) from twelve sessions with her Chinese graduate students, who sat in front of the kids for twenty minutes each session, playing with them while speaking in Mandarin.
By thge end of the month, three sessions per week, those babies' brains were virtually as good at recognizing Mandarin phonemes ar the brains of native born Chinese infants who'd been hearing Mandarin their entire young lives.
But, when Kuhl put Americna infants in front of a videotape or audito recording of Mandarin speech, the infants brains absorbed none of it. They might as well have heard meaningles noise. This was true DESPITE seeming to be quite engaged by the videos.
Kuhl concluded: 'The more complex aspects of language, such as phonetics, and grammar, are not acquired from TV exposure."
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