The child’s development

A study into child development published in 2010 was one of the first to demonstrate that childhood experience influences the structure of the developing brain. Despite millennia of child rearing, we have only a limited understanding of how babies take such gigantic strides in cognitive, linguistic, reasoning and planning ability. At birth, the brain has nearly a hundred billion neurons, as many as in adulthood. As the baby grows neurons get connected to other neurons. Using new technology, scientists can better understand the mystery of how a child goes from being barely able to see when just born to being able to talk, and invent an imaginary friend by the age of five. The more scientists find out about how children acquire the capacity for language, during this period, the more they realise that the baby brain is an incredible learning machine. Judit Gervain, a cognitive neuroscientist tested how good newborns are at distinguishing different sound patterns. The researchers found that brain regions responsible for speech and audio processing. In a later study, they found that the newborn brain was also able to distinguish between audio sequences. Gervain is excited by these findings because the order of sounds is the building block of words and grammar.‘ she says. ‘If something is at the beginning or at the end, it makes a big difference: “John killed the bear” is very different from “The bear killed John.”’ Elsewhere, researchers led by Patricia Kuhl, have found that language delivered by television, audio book, internet, or smartphone — no matter how educational — doesn’t appear to be enough for children’s development.. The researchers expected the group who’d watched videos in Mandarin Chinese to show the same kind of learning as the group who were face-to-face with the same sounds. Instead they found a huge difference. The babies exposed to the language through human interactions were able to distinguish between similar Mandarin sounds as well as native listeners. But the other babies — regardless of whether they had watched the video or listened to the audio — showed no learning whatsoever.