Dear Lucy Linguistics,
I’m so glad to hear that Dr. Jerskey thought of me in regards to a recommendation for your research book. As Dr. Jerskey might have informed you by now, I chose The Scientist in The Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About The Mind by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl. This book has been a huge eye opener for me as it might be for you as well, even though this book is for a language class, it goes way beyond just language. This book is all about babies and young children and what they know from the time they are born, to what they learn from all of the objects and people around them. Just as described in the title, babies are similar to scientists because they too are curious and question their every surroundings with an innate desire to find answers to these puzzling questions. I believe that everyone who is a mother or a father or has seen a baby should read this book, I feel that it relates to everyone because, after all we were all babies at some point and explains all of the mental processes that we went though at such a young age, but have no recollection of anymore. As it turns out a lot of what babies know about language is there from the time they are born, by the time they are about six months they can differentiate certain sounds in various languages even before they can speak themselves. For example a 4 month old that doesn’t come from an English speaking family can tell the difference between the r sound and the l sound in English, or Spanish or any language. But this is not true for adults, it appears that for Japanese speaking individuals this proves to be a difficult task. This all changes by the time these same babies are one year old, they can no longer tell the difference in other languages, but only in the primary language spoken in their culture and are no longer considered “citizens of the world” (106). Taking into account all the thousands’ of languages in the world it is astonishing how a baby can learn any of these languages and some even learn more than one. I for example, speak Spanish and English but my first language was Spanish which certainly is different compared to English but is similar to French because they are both a “system of grammatical gender” (120). I personally can relate to this gender based language because it is the language of my culture, but I hadn’t realized that is was a gender based language until I was presented with an article provided by Dr. Jerskey in ELL 101. According to this book a child that is learning to speak two languages will be capable of utilizing verb and noun endings shortly before an English speaking child, I think this explains just how much language can shape who we are as people and how we think about ourselves and others, because the fact is that, we have been doing this since infancy. Lucy I hope you take this book into consideration and if you do end up reading it, whether it’s for class or for fun I’m confident that you will enjoy it. Good luck!.
Sincerely,
Michelle Barreto
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