This was a fascinating book. It looks at how infants and very young children learn, how they take the vast input they receive and order it into meaningful information, language, relationships, etc. It was a little hard to get through because I was only reading a few pages at a time and like a lot of nonfiction, the more you can read in a chunk, the more you want to read. And like some books written by academics for a lay audience, it was a times a bit gimicky and pejorative. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it, especially the parts on language acquisition. Did you know that babies are born able to hear all the different sounds of all languages, but in the first six or so months of life they become able to only distinguish the sounds of the language(s) spoken around them? For example, Japanese adults do not distinguish between the r and l sounds of English. Japanese babies can hear the difference as newborns, but lose that ability rather quickly. There are many other examples of English-learning babies' limitations as well as how language relates to the way children learn about other aspects of their world.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Bookshelf: The Scientist in the Crib
This was a fascinating book. It looks at how infants and very young children learn, how they take the vast input they receive and order it into meaningful information, language, relationships, etc. It was a little hard to get through because I was only reading a few pages at a time and like a lot of nonfiction, the more you can read in a chunk, the more you want to read. And like some books written by academics for a lay audience, it was a times a bit gimicky and pejorative. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it, especially the parts on language acquisition. Did you know that babies are born able to hear all the different sounds of all languages, but in the first six or so months of life they become able to only distinguish the sounds of the language(s) spoken around them? For example, Japanese adults do not distinguish between the r and l sounds of English. Japanese babies can hear the difference as newborns, but lose that ability rather quickly. There are many other examples of English-learning babies' limitations as well as how language relates to the way children learn about other aspects of their world.
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I have had this book on my shelf for a few years now. I was supposed to read it during grad school for a project I was working on on language acquisition but never got around to it. Glad you enjoyed it. If you liked that I would also recommend How the Child's Mind Develops by David Cohen. Here is a quote from the back of the book "Whether you are a teacher, a psychology student or just a baffled parent, if you've ever wanted to take the top off a child's head, peer inside and see what's really going on in those funny little brains of theirs, David Cohen has the answer. An entertaining comprehensice, and highly readable book."
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