Patricia Kuhl of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington wanted to answer several questions: At what age do babies recognize their parents’ or caregivers’ native language? How open are they to the tones and tempo of a different language? At what developmental stage do their brains become efficient at storing language? Kuhl performed a series of experiments on infants that involved the children sitting in a parent’s lap and listening to them talk while tracking the infants’ head movements and, in some cases, images of their brains using
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