Werker – native language sensitivity

Babies are born with perceptual sensitivities that prepare them for, among other things, learning language. And we know now from decades of research really, that when babies are first born they’re sensitive to the individual sounds of the world’s languages, they’re sensitive to the rhythmical properties, to the stress patterns etc. And one of the remarkable changes that happens in the first weeks and months of life is that babies become more attuned to the properties of the native language, so they get better at discriminating the consonants and or vowels that are used in the native language. They get better at parsing, pulling multi work units in the native language in comparison to the unfamiliar language, and they get worse at doing these same things with nonnative speech.  

What’s interesting is this tuning to the sound properties and visual properties of the native language actually is important for later language acquisition. So as babies begin to learn words, they have to determine, or they have to be able to listen selectively to those sound differences that are going to be important and those that are not. So for example a baby learning English will need to treat different pronunciations of the word doll as all referring to the same object. So whether their mother says do you see this doll, or this is our doll, both of which change the character of that initial d, the English learning child needs to treat those pronunciations of doll as the same word, and hence learn how that refers to a particular object, whereas a baby in a Hindi learning environment, the d that would follow the s in this doll is a little bit different than the d that would follow the r in our doll. One of those is a dental d and one of those is a retroflex d, and those refer to two different words, those are two different words in Hindi, so the Hindi learning child needs to pay attention to that difference because it allows them to learn different words.