Adults can learn from children: They think before speaking, scientists find

By Robert Lee Hotz
Los Angeles Times

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In an infant's knowing eyes, scientists believe they have resolved one of the oldest debates in science and philosophy: Which comes first, an idea or the language to express it?

"How do we think about the world before we are corrupted by culture and the world?" Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom said. "One way to learn is to look at babies."

Researchers at Vanderbilt and Harvard universities demonstrated through experiments made public last week in Nature magazine that children do appear to think before they learn to speak. Moreover, infants seem to share fundamental ideas about the world around them that languages later alter.

To determine if thought precedes the acquisition of language, psychologists Susan Hespos at Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard took advantage of a subtle contrast in the way that the Korean and English languages characterize objects.

In a series of tests, 5-month-old infants were shown things nested within each other — such as a shoe in a box or a ring around a post — in categories corresponding to whether the objects fitted together tightly or loosely, a distinction important in the Korean language but absent from English. The researchers monitored how long each infant's gaze lingered, as a way of measuring whether the child noticed a difference.

The babies could perceive those distinctions that, through the limitations of language, their English-speaking parents had learned to ignore. "The babies were voting with their eyes," Hespos said. "Adults were glossing over the distinction that the babies were actually detecting."

Indeed, so indifferent are most English speakers to this distinction that when the scientists posed the same task to undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students could not believe the experiment was genuine. They kept asking if the test was a trick, Hespos said.

In their experiments, the researchers explored one conceptual linguistic difference, but there are almost as many variations in perception embedded in the world's languages as differences in sound and syllables.

Things that seem to be verities in English — such as time, cardinal directions, or left and right — often are handled quite differently in other languages, even wholly absent. Some languages place gender at the center of human relations, others are relatively indifferent to any division of the sexes.
 
The new research shows that there appears to be a universal core of meaningful distinctions that all humans share, at least in infancy.

"The babies seem to be equipped with all the concepts, not only the ones we use in English," Spelke said. "As you grow, you become less attentive to the distinctions that your language does not use."