I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth Read Free Book Online Page A

comprehension and production (naturally, the babies aren’t expected to speak). Over the course of as few as five days, Newport uses behavioral tests and brain imaging to watch language acquisition unfold—the whole endeavor is like applying time-lapse photography to learning. (It should be noted that these are all second languages for the subjects.)
    On the question of the differences between learning as a child and as an adult, she told me that in a recent series of studies, she added some inconsistencies, or errors, to the miniature languages. Five- and six-year-old children acquired the regular parts of the language, not the errors. Adults reproduced more inconsistencies. This is an example of the less-is-more hypothesis, argues Newport. “Kids are more cognitively limited. For certain kinds of tasks, that may be an advantage. They don’t get it all at once. They actually can’t acquire all the little irregular things about languages, all the details. They get the more consistent, regular parts. That produces a staged type of learning where you get the big patterns first and then you get the little details much later. Adults get all the details right at the start, and they never get the big patterns.”
    Her study reminded me of a moment when Matthew, our middle son, was about four—certainly, he had not yet learned to read. Standing in the kitchen one Saturday, Mark posed a riddle he had just read: “Mary’s father has five daughters: Nana, Nene, Nini, and Nono. What’s the fifth daughter’s name?” The name Nunu was on the tip of my tongue, when Matthew piped up. “Mary,” he said, and gazed at Mark and me as if nothing could be more obvious. I stared back at him and then realized that he was right.
    â€œHow did you know that?” I asked. Then I turned to Mark. “He’s brilliant!”
    No, I realized later, he was simply four and had not yet learned that if A, E, I, and O are presented in sequence, it’s a very good bet that U will follow. When Mark told the joke, I knew too much about vowels, and Matthew, who was a charming, talkative, outgoing child, but not necessarily brilliant, knew just the right amount, which is to say, very little.
    â€œThat’s exactly the same thing,” agreed Newport when I told her the story. Language learning is really a matter of learning patterns. “By mechanisms we don’t totally understand, we store an incredible wealth of quantitative details about how sounds combine,” says Newport. “That’s basically what learning a language is about. You do it with the sounds of your language. You do it with the meanings and what people are referring to. You do it with the sequences in which words occur. You don’t just memorize all the sound sequences. You somehow compute. You keep track of things that are very frequent combinations, frequent categories.”
    For spoken languages, you do all of that by listening. “The first year of life is largely a silent rehearsal,” wrote linguist Charles Yang in his book
The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
. The process starts before birth. Around six months of gestation, expectant mothers begin to feel the baby kick in response to loud noises. Bathed in amniotic fluid, the fetus can’t generally make out words, just as you can’t if you put your head underwater, much as you might have tried in the pool as a child. What a baby in utero does hear, over the low-frequency sounds of his mother’s blood flowing through her body and her steady heartbeat, is what linguists call prosody, the rhythm and contours of the mother’s native language. Babies hear enough of it to recognize and prefer their mother’s voice once they are born.
    How much there is to listen to in the first months and years of life has been shown to have a powerful effect on language ability or lack thereof. A landmark 1995