Part One - Prenatal psychology. The first of a two-part examination of…
The Secret Life of Babies - Part Two
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
Thirty years ago the conventional wisdom was that the fetus in the womb could not hear. Today scientists have shown that by the seventh month of pregnancy, all five of the fetus's senses are working and that the baby may actually remember and learn from prenatal experiences.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BABIES, a two-part documentary, explores the extent of the baby's vast world of perceptions, from intrauterine life (Part 1) to the first months following birth (Part 2). How does the baby perceive its world and ours? What are its capacities for learning and memorizing? Do babies respond to the voices of their mothers and other external stimuli? What happens when the baby leaves the intrauterine environment of amniotic fluid, where all its needs were satisfied almost instantly, and enters the world of air and gravity?
Filmed in France, Canada and the U.S., the documentary features remarkable intrauterine footage showing the fetus's response to external stimuli, evoking a sense of awe at the wondrous experience of childbirth. Through interviews with some of the world's leading cognitive and developmental psychologists, doctors, and scientists-including Dr. Anthony DeCasper (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), a specialist in the early development of human perception, Dr. Robert Lickliter (Florida International University), co-Director of the Infant Development Research Center, Dr. Linka Polka (McGill University), Director of McGill's inter-disciplinary doctoral program in language acquisition, and others-this film reveals what we know today about the baby's experiences before and after birth, in particular how it organizes its perceptions and how this relates to fundamental and lifelong questions of memory, language and learning.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BABIES shows that, although all the brain's neurons are present when the baby is born, the process of connecting them, and of acquiring and organizing information, continues well into the teenage years. Indeed, the brain's processing of experience is a lifelong activity, and, in that sense, being alive is being perpetually born.
'Enlightening...A thought-provoking, frequently illuminating analysis of a cutting-edge topic of both academic and general interest, this is highly recommended.'-Video Librarian
'With a great deal of sensitivity and concrete examples, the film reveals the state of contemporary research. It attempts to understand how, and with what knowledge and capacities, humans are born. This documentary has the grand merit of posing questions that any parent, or anyone observing a newborn, would eventually ask.'-L'Humanité
'Beautiful and well done, the material is intrinsically interesting, and there are some wonderful ultrasound views of the fetus and videos taken through a fetoscope.'-Science Books and Films
'Fascinating... parents, medical professionals, and students involved in neo-natal care will benefit greatly from seeing this documentary.' Leonardo On-Line Reviews
Citation
Main credits
George, Bernard (film director)
Other credits
Image, Jean-Louis Laforêt [and 3 others]; montage, Pierre-Joseph Licidé; musique originale, Robert Baccherini.
Distributor subjects
Biology; Family Relations; Health Issues; Medicine; Neuroscience and Neurology; Psychology; Science; Women's Health; Women's StudiesKeywords
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,
00:27:55.000 --> 00:27:59.999
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
00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.999
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.
00:29:55.000 --> 00:29:59.999
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
00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:09.999
watch it in action.
00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:14.999
Totally painless, but still used chiefly
as a research tool, these techniques
00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:20.000
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
00:30:55.000 --> 00:30:59.999
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
00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:20.000
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
00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:29.999
language acquired? Which of those
mechanisms are there right at birth?
00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:34.999
How much does baby bring to the process?
How much does his
00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:39.999
environment contribute? Thanks to
studies carried out with babies
00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:44.999
growing up in bilingual environments, a few
of these questions have been answered.
00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:49.999
Researchers even, um, uh, several years
ago, believed that when children
00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:54.999
who were exposed to two
languages from birth, um,
00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:59.999
they actually treat these two languages as if
they\'re one language. So they, in a sense,
00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:04.999
confuse the two, they treat the sounds of the two
languages as, as if they\'re part of one language.
00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:09.999
They treat the words from the two languages as if they\'re
part of a single language. But we now know that this is
00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.999
probably not true, that even
from, uh, birth, and probably
00:34:15.000 --> 00:34:19.999
prior to birth, children have already
begun to realize, in some sense,
00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:24.999
not consciously, but in a, an implicit way, that there,
uh, there are two languages that they\'re learning.
00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:33.000
[music]
00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:44.999
A baby, for example, hearing, whose mother only
spoke English (laughing) before they were born,
00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:49.999
will, um, be able to discriminate
English from French. Or, um,
00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:54.999
even, um, Italian from Dutch, because these are
languages whose rhythmic structure are very different,
00:34:55.000 --> 00:34:59.999
and that seems to be something
that newborns can do.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:04.999
There is some evidence that as
babies, um, gain exposure and,
00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:09.999
and listen to their native language, that they can begin to make
finer discriminations, so they could tell the difference between
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:14.999
their native language and another language
from the same rhythmic class. So, for example,
00:35:15.000 --> 00:35:19.999
English and Dutch are rhythmically similar
languages, so a baby learning English
00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:24.999
can, um, as, by four months of
age, or five months of age,
00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:29.999
can tell the difference
between English and Dutch.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.999
When you look at bilingual children,
what you find is that they will
00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:39.999
babble differently depending upon
who they\'re with. So, uh, in our
00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.999
own research we\'ve looked at children
are, uh, learning English from one
00:35:45.000 --> 00:35:49.999
parent and French from the other parent, and when you re, when you
analyze their babbling when they\'re with the English-speaking parent,
00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.999
you see that they actually babble like an
English-speaking child. If you look at them,
00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:59.999
or listen to them, when they\'re babbling with their French-speaking
parent, they actually sound like a French-speaking
00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:04.999
child who\'s babbling. So already at this
early stage, there\'s evidence that they, uh,
00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:10.000
know in some sense that there\'s, uh, two
different languages in their environment.
00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:34.999
One of the skills the baby has to
acquire is the ability to make out
00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:39.999
single, distinct words in an
uninterrupted flow of speech, to see
00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:44.999
whether an eight-month-old infant was capable
of doing this, he was read a story in which the
00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:50.000
same word was repeated several times.
00:36:55.000 --> 00:36:59.999
When the baby looks at the light, it triggers the recording.
As long as he keeps looking at it, the story continues.
00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:04.999
This indicates his attention span. After
the story is over, he was played a
00:37:05.000 --> 00:37:10.000
tape of the word being
repeated, and another word.
00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:19.999
He is clearly more attentive to
the word he has already heard,
00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:24.999
which demonstrates his
ability to isolate one word
00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:29.999
from stream of speech.
00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:34.999
For a long time, the idea was that when children
start to learn words, that they learned a concept
00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:39.999
or a meaning, and then they attached a
label to it. But now what we\'re learning
00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:44.999
is that infants learn a lot about the
sound of their language and isolate
00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:49.999
word forms, uh, also, before they
kinda, they have the meaning
00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:54.999
to attach to it.
00:37:55.000 --> 00:38:03.000
[music]
00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:24.999
Dations(ph) for language learning
are, uh, are really being
00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:29.999
established at the same time that a
lot of other cognitive and affective
00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:34.999
emotional systems are being, uh, developed
in the child. So for the child,
00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:39.999
language is not simply a system of
symbols or codes for communication,
00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.999
it\'s a, um, a system that\'s also
very, very intimately associated
00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:49.999
with their parents. With, uh,
their emotions. With, um,
00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:54.999
expressing themselves. So, I think
that there probably is a very
00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.999
close link between language,
and languages, and childrens\',
00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.999
um, emotional state,
emotional feelings, and how
00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:09.999
they think of themselves. Boo.
00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:15.000
Boo. Boo.
00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:43.000
[music]
00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:59.999
When a baby is born, it has
00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:04.999
all the neurons, individual nerve
cells that are in part of the brain.
00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:09.999
The baby has all of those.
It will never have any more.
00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:14.999
But they\'re not connected to each other.
And wisdom and intelligence and
00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:19.999
humor and all that arises from
how the cells are connected
00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:24.999
to each other, which happens over the
course of life well into the teenage
00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.999
years. Well into the teenage years.
And, and we now know it can even
00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:34.999
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
00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:49.999
smart in the sense that they are exquisite
learners, they can learn rapidly, so they can
00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:54.999
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.
00:41:00.000 --> 00:41:08.000
[non-English narration]
00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:23.000
[music]
00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:35.000
[music]
Distributor: Icarus Films
Length: 43 minutes
Date: 2005
Genre: Expository
Language: English; French / English subtitles
Grade: 9-12, College, Adult
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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