The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn

We used to think that babies learned words first and that words helped them sort out which sounds were critical to their language. But this research turned the argument around. Babies master the sounds of their language first, and that makes the words easier to learn.

It was as if the Korean-speaking children paid more attention to how their actions influenced the world, while the English-speaking children paid more attention to how objects fit into different categories. The likeliest explanation for this is that the children were influenced by what the grown-ups around them said, which in turn was shaped by the

One-year-old babies know that they will see something by looking where other people point; they know what they should do to something by watching what other people do; they know how they should feel about something by seeing how other people feel. The babies can use other people to figure out the world. In a very simple way, these one-year-olds are

The Big Idea, the conceptual breakthrough of the last thirty years of psychology, is that the brain is a kind of computer. That’s the basis of the new field of cognitive science. Of course, we don’t know just what kind of computer the brain is. Certainly it’s very different from any of the actual computers we have now.

These two interpretations are being hotly debated in the case of language learning. Some scientists believe there is a critical period for language acquisition in humans—a biological clock that cuts off our ability to learn later on. The most dramatic evidence of this comes from the terrible natural experiments that create “wild children,” children

Children create and revise theories in the same way that scientists create and revise theories. This idea seems to explain at least some types of cognitive development very well. We call it the theory theory. (The theory is that children have theories of the world.) We think there are very strong similarities between some particular types of early

Piaget wanted to find a link between Kant and the mollusks, between epistemology and biology. His great insight was that studying the development of human children was one way to do this.

Why do we do it? Do we produce motherese simply to get the babies’ attention? (It certainly does that.) Do we do it just to convey affection and comfort? Or does motherese have a more focused purpose? It turns out that motherese is more than just a sweet siren song we use to draw our babies to us. Motherese seems to actually help babies solve the L

Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way.