Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

At birth, babies have some 100 to 200 billion brain cells in place — more than they will ever have again, and all they will ever need. We were amazed to learn what they can already do with all that brainpower.

Newborns Know Their Language
In short order, newborns learn to recognize the language being spoken around them, as well as the voice speaking it. By four days old, they can distinguish their native tongue from others and show a marked preference for it. "It was first demonstrated with French babies," says Linda Acredolo, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Davis and co-author of Baby Minds. Researchers played tapes of pleasant singsongy things in French and in Russian, and the newborns demonstrated (by slowing or accelerating sucking on their pacifer) that they preferred their native lingua franca.

"It's mostly the musical quality that they respond to," says Lise Eliot, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Chicago Medical School and author of What's Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life.

By the time newborns enter the world, they've been listening to the rhythms of Mom's speech for months, ever since hearing began to kick in at the beginning of the third trimester. The specific cadences of their native language are like those catchy songs that get stuck in our heads, only not at all annoying. "It's not surprising that babies prefer their mother's voice," says Eliot. "Her voice is transmitted directly through her lungs and certainly more effectively than anything else." You're Speaking My Language
Tyree, left, "converses" with his mom. Babies are born ready to learn any language. They can even perceive certain speech sounds in world languages that adults can't discern. But by the end of the first year of life, this universal language readiness gets pruned away, as their brain homes in on its native tongue, which they've been overhearing since they were in the womb. They Mimic Mom and Dad
Some of the most compelling evidence of innate knowledge comes from the lab of Andrew Meltzoff, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Meltzoff­'s field of study is imitation, and his findings back in the 1970s began revolutionizing what we know about newborns. Prevailing opinion had maintained that infants couldn't begin to imitate facial expressions until they were 8 months old. And yet, Meltzoff and his team had found that when they stuck out their tongues and moved them from side to side, the newborns responded in kind.

Imitation is more than amusement for love-struck parents. It suggests profound neonatal comprehension. Think about all the information a baby must process before she can imitate an action. First, she must know that she has a tongue of her own. Then she needs to figure out where it is, that she has the power to move it, and finally, how to control it. Most significant, she has to recognize that her tongue is like the one protruding from the face in front of her. All this in people as young as 42 minutes old, according to the latest research.

Meltzoff believes that people are born knowing that they are like other people. "Babies can recognize compatible qualities with others. We think of that as the starting point from which all human development begins." Imitation, in other words, is the most powerful learning tool in an infant's kit. Everything a newborn will one day do, from using a spoon to consoling a friend, begins with watching and imitating what the people around him do. Baby See, Baby Do
This baby isn't being rude. He's simply demonstrating one of the more impressive abilities of the newborn: the ability to imitate. The feat of mimicry shown here suggests such profound comprehension we worried about getting this newborn to perform for the camera. Instead, Tyree was happy to stick his tongue back out at us. They Know (and Love) Your Face
Babies possess an inherent human ability to recognize and process visual patterns. Our brains are wired to seek out areas of high contrast, juxtapositions of dark and light, center and edge. Checkerboards make sense to babies. Target shapes fascinate them. Screaming red is a color they favor. Babies want bold. They want flashy. They want zebra stripes and leopard prints. They want Vegas.

"Now look at the face," says Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., the eminent Harvard developmental psychologist. "There's a strong contour line between the forehead and the hair. The white of the eye is sharply different from the pupil. The nose sticks right out there. The face is a very salient stimulus." As with language, scientists have devised cunning ways to measure newborn interest in faces. Researchers can show a baby side-by-side pictures of a human face and another object, and by analyzing a videotape of the baby's eye movements, an impartial observer — one who hasn't been told what the baby is looking at — can determine which image held the infant's attention longer. In study after study, the face has gone up against even the favored checkerboards, stripes, and targets, and each time it has emerged the undisputed champ.

An inborn responsiveness to faces makes intuitive sense. The sooner a newborn can identify his parents and form a relationship with them, the better his chances of survival. Less transparent is how an infant can know his mother's face a mere two days after birth. The feat becomes even more astounding when one considers that newborns have terrible vision. Of all the senses, sight is the least developed at birth; acuity in newborns is about 20/300 (they'd never be allowed to drive).

What happens is this: A baby quickly makes a mental representation of the face it spends the most time studying, usually the mother's. So, while the rest of the world may fade in and out, Mom emerges from the fuzz crisp and clear. She's plasma TV in a land of cathode-ray sets.

Zachary, left, seems intrigued by his mom's upside-down face. I Like Your Look
The human face, with its areas of light and dark, round and linear, is utterly captivating to a newborn, particularly Mom's face, which a baby can identify just two days after birth. Jamie, left, stares adoringly at his mother as she coos to him in a brand of motherese that just the two of them understand. Their Senses Work Together
One study set out to determine whether babies can "see" with their hands, the way an adult does when he reaches into his pocket, feels a flat disk of a certain size, and instantly generates a mental image of a quarter. This is known as cross-modal matching, the ability to correspond between two senses. Researcher Andrew Meltzoff devised an experiment in which babies were given an object to hold without seeing it, and then were shown that object and a diff­erent one. If they looked longer at the thing they had fondled, they would be understood to recognize it. The babies failed the test.

But before writing up the results, Meltzoff happened to talk to a mother in his lab. She reminded him that month-old babies are inclined to figure things out with their mouths.

Meltzoff devised a new test involving pacifiers. Some featured nubby nipples and others were smooth. He gave the pacifiers to different sets of babies without allowing them to see what they were sucking, and after 90 seconds he showed each baby both types of pacifiers. Newborns who had sucked the smooth pacifier looked back and forth and then settled on the smooth one, while infants who had sucked the nubby pacifer settled on it. "By sense of touch alone they knew what something looked like," says Meltzoff. "That means all their senses are speaking to one another from early on." Pacifying?
Scientists use pacifiers and what they call suck rates to gauge babies' interest levels. In general, when newborns are interested in something, they slow down on their pacifiers to pay attention. When they're less interested (babies bore easily, as it turns out), they suck faster. They Recall What They Hear
In a hugely influential 1986 study, researchers Anthony DeCasper and Melanie Spence of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro asked expectant mothers to read The Cat in the Hat aloud twice a day during the last six weeks of their pregnancies. Hours after the babies were born, the researchers played audiotapes for them of their mothers reading the Dr. Seuss story and a different story. By an overwhelming majority, the newborns exposed in utero to The Cat in the Hat preferred it to the story they hadn't heard. In this instance, familiarity won out over novelty, which isn't always the case with newborns, who crave novel sights, sounds, and other stimuli to feed their hungry brains.

But how, you might reasonably ask, do researchers gather literary opinions from wordless babies? Again, by watching their pacifiers. In general, when newborns are interested in something, they slow down on their pacifers to pay attention. When they're bored, they suck faster.

So, at Greensboro, the researchers measured suck rates and found that the test babies eased off significantly while listening to The Cat in the Hat. Obviously, the little bookworms weren't responding to the story itself. Hats and cats, even singularly outrageous ones, meant nothing to them. What piqued their interest was hearing their mother's voice repeating a familiar pattern of sounds.