TED Talk by Deb Roy on The Birth of a Word + Patricia Kuhl on Linguistic Genius of Babies

This is an amazing introduction to how researchers are gaining insights into how language is used in human interaction and how children acquire the language word by word.

Roy video and audio recorded every word of language interaction in his house over several years and created computer programs to transcribe, trace and analyze the data. Wow.

He shows an example of how his son gradually learned the word WATER, starting from Ga-ga. The child experiments with various versions of the sound until arriving at a very close approximation in his second year.

I followed my son's English speech development for three years also, but not like this. The potential for understanding first and second language acquisition is immense once tools like this become more available.

Also, below is another very cool TED talk by Patricia Kuhl of my alma mater UW showing that small children (up to 8 months?) can learn (=distinguish) between all types of foreign sounds by being exposed to them in person (not recording). A clear indication of the critical period for sound recognition such as the difference between the American /r/ /l/ and the Japanese /r/

Amazingly, they have a magnetoencephalography machine that can put babies in to see what is happening in their brain. Cool.