WEBVTT

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[music]

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In his mother\'s womb, baby is now
about to come into our world.

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He has been growing in a sealed-off
world, in a time dimension

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which seems quite different from our own. How
will he adapt to the world awaiting him?

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A world of light, air, and gravity?
How will he react

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to this huge change in his environment?
Will he maintain a vestigial

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memory of his uterine life, and the
experiences he had through his mother?

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These are the types of questions being
asked by specialists seeking clues

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to the mystery of human development.

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[sil.]

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[music]

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[music]

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[music]

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The human being is the only mammal
who cries at birth. Does he cry

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because he has been torn away from his first
life? He knows he is coming into the world,

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and that from now on, he\'ll have
no choice but to adopt to it.

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[music]

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When Eytan made the transition from water
to air, he swallowed a little fluid

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and has to be aspirated
for his own comfort.

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Immediately, baby perceives the
range of differences facing him.

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[music]

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He\'s cute.

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One of the things to appreciate
about the young newborn infant as

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it has just emerged from the
uterus into the world is that

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it is a relatively naive perceiver, meaning
it hasn\'t been in the world before.

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So how it comes to organize
its attention and its

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perceptual processing that guides its learning and
memory is something that we would very much like

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to understand more deeply and fully.
And probably the best

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clue that we have on how very young infants
in the newborn stage organize their

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selective attention comes from the
perspective of what would be familiar

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to them in the world, given
they haven\'t been here before.

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What do you say? I have a secret
to tell you. A secret to tell you.

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You can eat more. I can give you more,

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if you want. Are you at all interested?

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No, not at all.

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Baby\'s arrival on our planet is
guided by his mother\'s voice

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and smell. Which of baby\'s perceptions
will he remember from his

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previous life? What baggage
does he bring? Does he

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recall the sounds he heard from
inside the womb? For Ondine,

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Héloïse\'s little girl, the question is
especially interesting. How will she

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react when she hears her mother playing
the harp? Doctor Carolyn Granier-Deferre

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and her team at Port-Royal Hospital
are investigating the question

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by observing variations in the
baby\'s heart rate. They may be able

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to demonstrate that Ondine is familiar
with the music that she heard in utero,

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that she has a memory.

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[music]

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[sil.]

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[music]

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[music]

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But it\'s interesting to me that it
doesn\'t really matter what the event is

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that they experience, because in some
sense it has no meaning to them,

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it\'s just happiness, but after they\'re born,
when they encounter that event again,

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they seem to like it in the
sense that it\'s calming,

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like the music with Héloïse, uh,
they\'re attracted to it, they pay

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attention to it, it\'s a,

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not a bad thing for them. They\'re not afraid of it, they
tend to be attracted to it, in fact. Prenatal experiences,

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I think, provide a stepping stone,
a building block because, uh, it\'s

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just the beginning of development. There\'s a whole
life in front of this baby where new experiences

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will occur. But the life begins in utero,
an individual life with individual

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memories. So, um,

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no, I don\'t believe anything is lost.
I think it\'s just the beginning.

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[music]

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Birth is a beginning which confronts baby
with a flood of new events in perception.

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This is the case with vision, for example,
which requires the acquisition of movement

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perception, colors in focus on the image.
What the infant discovers in the

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outer world bears absolutely no comparison
to what he\'s able to receive in his

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mother\'s womb. It is the basic question
of the role of our perceptions.

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Noam, who is not yet 40 hours old, is taking
part in a test. Is he already capable of visual

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recognition he hitherto only touched?
In other words,

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does his brain have the ability to transfer
information from one compartment to another?

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From one sense to another? In this case,
from tactile perception to sight.

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After he has gotten used to
touching a small cylindrical

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object with his hand, he\'s presented
with the sight of the same object and a

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second different one.

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[music]

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In 98% of the cases, the newborn merely
glances at the object he has already

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touched for a few seconds, as if he had
recognized it as being familiar, whereas he

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stares at the new object.

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This amazing capacity for astonishment and
adaptation is the motor for learning.

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We discover, remember, or forget
in the course of these sensorial

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experiences which gradually
shape the creatures we become.

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[music]

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At Paris\'s University Rene Descartes,
research on visual perception is underway.

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How does the baby learn to differentiate
between the faces of those around him?

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How does he distinguish between what
is familiar and what is different?

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How can we question baby? How can he

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give us an answer? We observe his head movements
and the amount of time he gazes at one picture

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or another. For this experiment on face
recognition, he is shown the same face

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several times, and then another different
one. If he focuses his attention on the last

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one, researchers conclude that
he differentiated between them.

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[music]

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The infant is able to differentiate
between the faces he encounters

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regardless of their type. This
ability is lacking in the

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adult, who differentiates only
between faces familiar to him.

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[sil.]

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[sil.]

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[music]

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Baby\'s experience with seeing and how it helps him learn
about life interests researchers because it also reflects

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his ability to adapt to the complexity
of the world. What happens when movement

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and action are introduced? At the
University of Florida, the question

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gave rise to an exciting experiment.

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[music]

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A lot of the research on face perception just deals with static
images of faces and so we don\'t really know how this generalizes

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to the world of faces and the context
of people engaged in activities

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or speaking, um, and so forth.
And we suspected that, um,

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there probably was quite a difference between how
they attended to information in static images

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and in real, real dynamic events.
So, the closest we

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could get to that was, um, showing infants
movies of adults performing activities,

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uh, ordinary activities.

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[music]

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And we found, surprisingly,
that infants were able to

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detect a change in activity but not
a change in person, at five months.

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So this told us, we thought
that the activities

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were so interesting, they were overwhelming
their attention, not that they could not detect

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a person\'s face when they were engaged in an
activity, it\'s just that their attention doesn\'t

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go there. So, uh, we tested
this out by showing a frozen

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image of the person\'s face engaged in
the activity, so, brushing their hair,

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um, without any movement, a frozen
image, and indeed, in that condition,

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infants were able to detect a
change in the face of the person.

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The general, um, take-home
message is that infants are very

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engaged by action and activities,
and from a very young age they\'re

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attending to how, um, actions, what actions
look like and how objects are used

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in the context of activities. And we
also examined this question by asking

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if infants could detect, um, the

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correct versus the incorrect use of
common objects that they\'ve seen.

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They look a lot to that image,
because it\'s surprising to them.

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So we think they\'re paying attention to how
objects are used in the context of actions, even

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at three and a half months, we\'ve shown that infants
can do the same thing if you first familiarize

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them with the correct use of an object.

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[music]

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[music]

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The newborn infant spends
most of his time sleeping.

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What sort of slumber is it? What is
its purpose? Research into these

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questions has revealed significant differences
between the infant\'s sleep and the adult\'s,

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especially in phases of active sleep
where brain functions are greatly

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engaged. This cerebral activity might
reflect the work of assimilating the day\'s

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experiences.

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During these long periods of

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active sleep, one can observe the face of
the newborn going through the fundamental

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emotions we all share:
joy, suffering, anger,

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fear, disgust, surprise.

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[music]

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The very young infant\'s active sleep
could thuse reflect a confrontation

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between behavior arising from instinct,
behavior which is part of our genetic

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heritage, and behavior related
to daily experiences, as if

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it was necessary for us occasionally
to adjust our innate behavior patterns

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to the reality of the world.

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How much of baby\'s cerebral
function is innate? For centuries,

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scientists could only imagine the
brain inside the skull. Today we can

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watch it in action.

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Totally painless, but still used chiefly
as a research tool, these techniques

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have only recently been applied to the
observation of the newborn\'s brain.

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The subject of this experiment is language.

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For almost 50 years, scientists have been
debating the degree to which the infant brain

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is organized at birth. Is it a loose
network that will gradually take

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on more complexity as the baby grows,
or is the complex structure hardwired

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from the beginning? Researchers read a
story to little Laurelyne who is just

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12 weeks old. The goal is to determine which
parts of her brain will be solicitated

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by the listening experience.

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Children have the neurological
capacity for language, uh,

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as soon as they\'re conceived, as soon as
the fetus is formed, but that this is a

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very general kind of capacity, that
it\'s not specific to language,

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so that a great deal of language in fact has
to be learned. However, the innate capacity

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they have for, for language begins
to exercise itself very, very,

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uh, early in development. So there\'s evidence
that even before they\'re born, even as

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fetuses, uh, children are starting
to, uh, establish the foundations

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for language. And so when they are born,
they\'re tuning in to the language

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that they hear around them. In other words,
language learning doesn\'t start after

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they\'re born, it starts before they\'re born.
But it\'s not something that\'s innate,

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it\'s the capacity that\'s innate.

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[sil.]

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Proof of an innate neurological
capacity for language

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opens new horizons for research.
By what mechanisms is

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language acquired? Which of those
mechanisms are there right at birth?

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How much does baby bring to the process?
How much does his

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environment contribute? Thanks to
studies carried out with babies

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growing up in bilingual environments, a few
of these questions have been answered.

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Researchers even, um, uh, several years
ago, believed that when children

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who were exposed to two
languages from birth, um,

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they actually treat these two languages as if
they\'re one language. So they, in a sense,

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confuse the two, they treat the sounds of the two
languages as, as if they\'re part of one language.

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They treat the words from the two languages as if they\'re
part of a single language. But we now know that this is

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probably not true, that even
from, uh, birth, and probably

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prior to birth, children have already
begun to realize, in some sense,

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not consciously, but in a, an implicit way, that there,
uh, there are two languages that they\'re learning.

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[music]

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A baby, for example, hearing, whose mother only
spoke English (laughing) before they were born,

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will, um, be able to discriminate
English from French. Or, um,

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even, um, Italian from Dutch, because these are
languages whose rhythmic structure are very different,

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and that seems to be something
that newborns can do.

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There is some evidence that as
babies, um, gain exposure and,

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and listen to their native language, that they can begin to make
finer discriminations, so they could tell the difference between

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their native language and another language
from the same rhythmic class. So, for example,

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English and Dutch are rhythmically similar
languages, so a baby learning English

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can, um, as, by four months of
age, or five months of age,

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can tell the difference
between English and Dutch.

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When you look at bilingual children,
what you find is that they will

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babble differently depending upon
who they\'re with. So, uh, in our

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own research we\'ve looked at children
are, uh, learning English from one

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parent and French from the other parent, and when you re, when you
analyze their babbling when they\'re with the English-speaking parent,

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you see that they actually babble like an
English-speaking child. If you look at them,

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or listen to them, when they\'re babbling with their French-speaking
parent, they actually sound like a French-speaking

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child who\'s babbling. So already at this
early stage, there\'s evidence that they, uh,

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know in some sense that there\'s, uh, two
different languages in their environment.

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One of the skills the baby has to
acquire is the ability to make out

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single, distinct words in an
uninterrupted flow of speech, to see

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whether an eight-month-old infant was capable
of doing this, he was read a story in which the

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same word was repeated several times.

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When the baby looks at the light, it triggers the recording.
As long as he keeps looking at it, the story continues.

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This indicates his attention span. After
the story is over, he was played a

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tape of the word being
repeated, and another word.

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He is clearly more attentive to
the word he has already heard,

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which demonstrates his
ability to isolate one word

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from stream of speech.

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For a long time, the idea was that when children
start to learn words, that they learned a concept

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or a meaning, and then they attached a
label to it. But now what we\'re learning

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is that infants learn a lot about the
sound of their language and isolate

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word forms, uh, also, before they
kinda, they have the meaning

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to attach to it.

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[music]

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Dations(ph) for language learning
are, uh, are really being

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established at the same time that a
lot of other cognitive and affective

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emotional systems are being, uh, developed
in the child. So for the child,

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language is not simply a system of
symbols or codes for communication,

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it\'s a, um, a system that\'s also
very, very intimately associated

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with their parents. With, uh,
their emotions. With, um,

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expressing themselves. So, I think
that there probably is a very

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close link between language,
and languages, and childrens\',

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um, emotional state,
emotional feelings, and how

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they think of themselves. Boo.

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Boo. Boo.

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[music]

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When a baby is born, it has

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all the neurons, individual nerve
cells that are in part of the brain.

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The baby has all of those.
It will never have any more.

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But they\'re not connected to each other.
And wisdom and intelligence and

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humor and all that arises from
how the cells are connected

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to each other, which happens over the
course of life well into the teenage

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years. Well into the teenage years.
And, and we now know it can even

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happen beyond the teenage years. So
note the baby\'s not as smart as they

00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:39.999
will ever be, on the contrary, they
baby is, um, uh, not very smart

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:44.999
at all in the sense that they don\'t
know all, many things, but they are

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smart in the sense that they are exquisite
learners, they can learn rapidly, so they can

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pick up information very quickly. And the
new information they pick up helps organize

00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:59.999
the brain that is being built.

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[non-English narration]

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[music]

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[music]