by Christine Kenneally BH | Sep 21, 2007 | Chimpanzees, Infants, Orangutan, Social complexity/connection
Chimpanzees are smarter than humans. Orangutans are smarter than chimpanzees. Humans are smarter than chimpanzees. Which of these statements is true? More at Huffington Post.
by Christine Kenneally BH | Aug 24, 2007 | Infants, Intonation, Motherese, Rhesus monkey
LiveScience brings together two fascinating studies on motherese–the swooping, exagerated way that mothers speak to their babies. In the first study, scientists played different examples of English baby-talk to a group of non-literate, hunter-horticulturalists...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Aug 24, 2007 | Infants, Intonation
Young babies don’t do a lot, but every year we discover there is a lot more going on inside than you can tell. The latest news is that four-month-olds already have an idea about the shape of a word. EEG measurement showed that infants this young recognize...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Aug 6, 2007 | Infants, Words
Children typically acquire a few words very slowly and then around 2 years of age undergo a ‘word explosion.’ A cognitive scientist at the University of Iowa has built a mathematical model which suggests that this amazing phenomenon is not genetically...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Aug 6, 2007 | Infants, Vowels
Young infants can distinguish subtle contrasts that exist in speech sounds of all languages of all the world. English babies, for example, hear the difference between Zulu clicks, something that untrained English adults are hopeless at. This ability is lost as...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Jul 16, 2007 | Accents, Infants, Languages
The tendency to favor your own social group over others emerges before you’ve learned anything about current disputes or historical conflict, before you’ve even learned how to talk. Children show strong early preferences for people speaking their native...
