Lift Up Your Hearts!

The RobWords YouTube channel is often interesting, but this one will resonate strongly with some of my readers, who have long known that babies are geniuses, and not just in language. It starts out basic, but then gets into some fascinating cutting-edge research, such as 

• Babies in the womb can tell the difference between one language and another.
• Four-month-old babies can tell different languages apart without hearing them, by watching the speaker's lips.
• Babies use a complex statistical process to figure out word boundaries.
• Children figure out grammar patterns before age two, e.g. children brought up in an English-speaking environment have by then already learned that word order is important.

Two questions this short explanation raises in my mind:

• What does the importance of lip-watching in language development mean for children born blind, and for those whose view of the speaker's lips was obscured during that critical time by a face mask? (I know a speech therapist who was exceedingly frustrated by trying to work with children who could not see her mouth thanks to COVID restrictions.)
• For babies to learn words, then phrases, then sentences may be the most common pattern, but I find fascinating that one of our grandchildren—whose speech and grasp of language is top-notch—did the process in reverse, i.e. to all appearances, he learned complete sentences first, then figured out how to break them down into smaller parts.