WRIT 372: September 11th Post

Could babies be smarter than fully-grown adults? It’s surprising, but in ways they are! Their motor skills may not be up to spec, but their linguistic capabilities are off the charts. Many little babies, like the one shown below, we’re strapped up to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine and presented with different sets of vowels, the majority in correct order, but a few were incorrect. Similarly, adults were hooked up to the EEG machine and presented with the exact same tests; they were admittedly not as stylish though.

For nearly 20 minutes, scientists played audible sets of syllables such as “le-wi-bu” which can be derived from “The boy always smiles”. They would also mix-it-up by making the pairs of syllables incorrect, such as “le-wi-to”. Amazingly, babies were able to detect these rule violations at a rate higher than adults. Adults had to be prompted to look for dependencies between the syllables at hand to even have a chance to keep up with the babies.    

Researchers agreed this automatic recognition ability, babies use, is lost early on. Thus explaining why the adults struggled exponentially more than the babies, because adults have to search and be alerted to what they’re looking for, while babies can automatically detect discrepancies in linguistics.

http://www.mpg.de/6340865/babies_language-learning