Inside the mind of a baby

Transcription

Inside the mind of a baby

01:00:03:01
How does a baby's mind work? They may be small, but from their very first moments, human beings are always absorbing information. And while they may not learn to stand up until they're roughly a year old, they start to learn language much sooner. But how does a baby learn a language? And what are the factors that affect this learning process?

01:00:27:16
Salomé and Enea are both 12 months old, and today they're going to help scientists to unravel the mystery.

01:00:35:00
They're heading for the BabyLab, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Around a thousand babies are brought here by their parents each year. The laboratory studies cognition in small children, and the mental processes that enable them to learn.

01:00:49:22
The lab's teams of psycholinguists take a particular interest in the ways children learn sentence structure, the arrangement of sounds in a language, and the effects of social environment on a child's cognitive development.

SHO TSUJI, psycholinguist
01:01:03:04
Children are still a lot better at learning than artificial intelligence. They don't need nearly as much data, they're very efficient, and what we really want to find out is, “How are they so good at it?”

01:01:15:21
One thing that babies are very good at is learning from their social environment. They absorb social signals, and what we're really trying to understand is how they do that, and which particular social signals are important to them.

01:01:31:19
One essential factor in a baby's language development is the conversation spoken by the adults around them. Long before they start to speak, babies are able to understand words, using vital clues such as their position in a sentence to discern their meaning.

01:01:46:15
Mireille Babineau has devised an experiment to verify this. She's going to play Salomé two lists of sentences containing verbs and familiar nouns. The first list is grammatically correct, while the second is not.

01:02:01:06
By filming Salomé's responses with a camera, she is able to measure her attention span for each sentence on the list. Just like the thirty or so babies that were tested before her, Salomé appears to pay closer attention when listening to sentences that are grammatically correct, even though she's still unable to say the words that are being used.

MIREILLE BABINEAU, psycholinguist
01:02:20:11
In the first year of a child's life, they're learning sounds. Children babble and make noises, but may not say their first words. At this stage, you would naturally assume that they don't yet know the basic principles of the language's syntax, and that there are lots of words they don't understand.

01:02:38:03
But actually that's not the case, because they're learning everything all at once. They're learning the sounds of the language, the meaning of words, and also syntax, word order, and the ways these words are connected.

01:02:48:15
They're taking it all in at once, and when we speak to children we use complete sentences. So of course, they're going to absorb the syntactic context, and pay attention to that. This awareness of context makes it easier to learn new words, because it gives them a very useful reference point that helps them to learn the meanings of new words.

01:03:13:11
While a key factor in learning appears to be human interaction, babies are now being raised in an environment where screens are increasingly present. Admittedly, digital technologies can be harmful to children in certain cases, but if used properly, they can also act as a learning aid.

01:03:30:22
So how can digital tech be useful to babies? Enea has had very little exposure to screens, and he's going to help us find out. By fixing a tag to his forehead, Sho Tsui and Cécile Crimon will be able to use an oculometer to track Enea's pupil movements in real time.

01:03:50:15
They're going to set this little boy a challenge. Can he learn a new word in the space of just a few minutes? To find out, they show him an interactive image of a bear displayed on a screen. The bear's eyes will follow the movements of the child's eyes. Its eyes can also point to various objects and connect them with words.

CÉCILE CRIMON, psycholinguist
01:04:11:14
Last year, we tested some 50 children who were all roughly 12 months old. We found that they were able to make a connection between a new object that we showed them, and which they had never seen before, and a new word that we taught them, in association with the new object.

01:04:27:04
They had never heard this word before either, and that's something we can be sure of, since we invented it. What we now need to do, by testing this new group of children, is to see whether it's that interactivity that plays a key role in enabling them to learn these new words, or not. That's something we still want to find out.

01:04:48:01
Unlike a regular screen, which is passive, the program that Enea is using is based on the concept of temporal contingency. The bear moves at a speed that's tailored to suit the child, and catches their attention just as an adult would.

01:05:02:18
Even though babies naturally respond more positively to a human being when learning a word, this technique could one day replace passive screens and make it possible to create interactive programs specially for young children.

SHO TSUJI, psycholinguist
01:05:16:11
Here at the BabyLab, we get many parents asking the same question: Are screens good or bad for children? And in fact, I found that we still have very few answers to that question. That's one of the main reasons for running this program.

01:05:30:08
We know that interactivity plays an important role, and that gives us a very good starting point for developing these types of applications. But even so, we need to remain extremely vigilant, and carefully test whether a program is truly working or not. That's what our research is all about.

01:06:01:06
Nevertheless, breakthroughs such as these should not encourage us to speak to babies the way we speak to adults, or to assume that face-to-face interaction can ever be replaced by watching a screen.

01:06:10:10
The exaggerated intonations that we instinctively use can help capture a child's attention, and guide them through the vast labyrinth of language. A smile or a look can also help babies to connect learning with emotions. These are the first steps in a quest for knowledge that will last for the rest of their lives.