Linguistic Genius of Children - Essay Example

Linguistic Genius of Children The presentation by Patricia Kuhl aims to help us understand how babies learn language and by extension how learning takes place in human beings. Essentially, Kuhl is of the view that children learn languages by mapping critical aspect of language through what she refers to as statistics even before they begin to speak. The ability to map a language in infants it at their peak at around two months of age. Kuhl talks of the infants taking statistics (Kuhl) relating to sounds of the language and as a result, being able to distinguish between languages. What is interesting is the fact that this ability is so ‘sharp’ that the infant is able to distinguish between typically all languages, an ability not found in grown ups. Patricia’s presentation can be understood in the context of language acquisition among children. It has to be noted, especially through observations, that children are well adapted to acquire language better than grown ups. Looking at how children acquire language compared to how adults do the same, especially the second language, there is no doubt that children are better in this task. It the key issue according to Patricia is that when we speak continuously, children are able to pick out units from that language and are able to segments this into unique ‘units’. It is from these units that children are able to pick out their statistics, making each language and its words unique to the other languages. My point is that interactions with the baby is important in aiding language acquisition. When Kuhl exposed a baby to 12 laboratory visits, to teach them Mandarin, each time exposing the babies to audio visual devices, the results were negligible. This was in stark contrast with the same experiment but which involved face to face interaction. Looking at the above, in this experiment involving exposure to audio-visual devices to learn language, even the statistics the baby’s ability to learn a new language appears to have been hindered considerably. The above is important especially in this world of technology. A lot of parents have found pleasure in having their young children operate their electronic devices such as iphones. Indeed, there are instances whereby such instances have been able to operate such devices even before they begin to talk. Besides, there has been considerable debate as to the impact of exposure to television on the development of language acquisition skills. From this presentation, we get to learn that such an exposure is detrimental to language development skills of the baby. For the baby to learn language, there needs to be more face-to-face interaction with the parents or caregivers. From the work of Kuhl, we learn that baby’s learn better through interactions with others. Hence, the need to be talk to, listen to stories, read to and even hear songs. This way, this integration helps them to better map the language to have the unique statistics of the language. This helps them to say words and later on these children will be able to read. To conclude, it can be held that baby’s learn better when they are exposed to face-to face interactions rather than exposure to electronic devices. The challenge is to create more time to interact with the babies and expose them to places they can interact with other children and people. This will help such babies to improve their acquisition of language. The question is whether or note this applies to children of school going age because at that she parents are interested in better performance in the languages. What do Babies Think? The stages of development of a child presents parents with numerous challenges. This is borne mainly because we see the babies and children doing things we feel are stupid and we are unable to understand why they do such things. Alison Gopnik is of the opinion that even with what appears to be stupid kind of thinking form the babies and children, looked at keenly, these group is in fact more intelligent that we have ever thought (Gopnik). Alison Gopnik is of the view that in general, babies and children are better thinkers than adults. They are more adventurous in their thinking and as such, they are able to solve a lot of problems on their own, in more creative ways than we can imagine. To be more creative therefore, Gopnik is of the opinion that we should be able to understand how children think and adopt such a form of thinking. In this paper, we have to argue that the best way to become creative, open minded and innovative is to think like a child. Thinking like a child does not mean becoming a child, but to understand the thinking process children undergo when faced with problems and try to emulate that and see how we can work within that concept. Thinking like a child, according to Gopnik, would involve going through a number of hypothesis. Generation of hypothesis on what can work and what cannot work is the crux of the thinking process. It helps us come with weird hypothesis and prove ourselves against such. But it also calls on us to be fast in evaluating our hypothesis so that we are able to see what works and what doesn’t even before we commit resources. This way, we are able to save on time and resources and therefore avoid wastes. Creativity also involves not giving up. Being able to harness our internal emotions and energies in those instances we fail so as to keep ourselves going even in the face of setbacks. In her example, the child went through five hypotheses in the span of two minutes before a solution could be generated. That internal energy that keeps one from going from failure through failure up to a point the solution is found, and each time making progress is what is largely missing. Perhaps we can say adults find it difficult to reconcile with failure and therefore gives up early. But again, we can only make progress each time when we quickly learn the cause of our failure and measures we can adopt to avoid such failure. Progress gives us the internal energy to hang on and fight more. Another issue that comes in is the open minded. Children are enthusiastic in trying new ideas and are not bothered with status quo. They learn a lot within a short span of time but are fast in appreciating that there can be another approach to the issue at hand. As a result, it is important to note that children will be fast in adopting new approaches. Then, when things do not work, there should be a willingness to try out new things and see if it will move us forward. In conclusion, we have to say that thinking like children does not mean becoming children. We have to appreciate that children are creative thinkers are innovative and open minded and that what makes them better. Hence, we have to draw lessons and apply this in becoming creative, innovative and open minded. Works Cited Gopnik, Alison. "What Do Babies Think?" 2013. www.ted.com/.../alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_th... 25 April 2015. Kuhl, Patricia. "The linguistic genius of babies." 2013. https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies/transcript?language=en. 25 April 2015. Read More