Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Language


After we had a lecture on speech perception, I came across an article called Language and the Baby Brain. The article explains acquisition of language from the neuropsychological angle. We all know that the younger you are, the easier it is to learn a new language. One of the reasons is that baby’s brain is wired differently from an adult’s brain – baby’s brain has much more neural connections. Research shows that babies can hear, separate, and process individual sounds and words with up to 8 milliseconds gap between them. This ability helps young kids learn multiple languages without significant efforts.
Interesting facts:
1)                    The most spoken language in the world is Mandarin (Spanish comes second; English is third)
2)                    Humans currently speak 6,800 different languages.
3)                    15,000 – number of connections each neuron in baby’s brain can make.
4)                    6,000 – number of words in 6 year old child’s vocabulary.
5)                    50,000 –number of words required to speak advanced English.

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