TED Talks: The Linguistic Genius of Babies

Patricia Kuhl on how babies use sophisticated reasoning when learning language.

ByABC News
March 29, 2011, 2:41 PM

— -- TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to "ideas worth spreading."

At TED, the world's leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks then are made available, free, at TED.com.

Starting last month, ABC News began taking a deeper look into the remarkable work of TED speakers and feature their related TEDTalks on ABCNews.com.

At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

Click here to learn more about TED.

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