Ted Talk Summary

The Linguistic Genius of Babies Ted talk by Patricia Kuhl relates back to a subject we have learned in a previous chapter of the Third Edition of “Discovering the Lifespan” by Robert S. Feldmam. Specifically, the second module of chapter three, which discusses cognitive development in infancy. The point that Patricia spoke about that stood out to me most was the mention of motherese speech. I had never heard of this term until I came across it in the textbook, and then again in this TED talk. Motherese speech, now known as infant-directed speech, is “a type of speech directed toward infants, characterized by short, simple sentences” (Feldman, 2015, p 130). Patricia’s research shows that infants who were exposed to someone speaking another language in person to them, were able to

The interactionist perspective, which suggests that “language development is produced through a combination of genetically determined predispositions and environmental circumstances”, could also explain why infants exposed to a physical person speaking a different language to them were able to learn it, compared to infants who were not in the same setting (Feldman, 2015, p 129). Another concept from class that I noticed Patricia using in her research and described in her TED talk was the learning theory approach. The learning theory approach is “the theory that language acquisition follows the basic laws of reinforcement and conditioning” (Feldman, 2015, p 128). In the TED talk, a video is shown of a panda popping out of a lit up box while drumming. Patricia later explains that the box did this when an infant would respond to changes in the phonemes “ah” and “e”. Unfortunately, infants are praised and or rewarded for errors as well because parents and caregivers are unaware that the child may use the same word to refer to multiple