Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Baby flippin

A recent article article in Scientific American talks about the prime window in how we learn to speak. Baby talk again has it's place in developing speech in a certain time frame. What was interesting to me is the importance of social cuing in learning language. IMO I feel that the social cues on the right side of face in most people(the left visual field of the viewer) are more expressive than the left side of face(the right visual field of the viewer) which lead to a greater muscular control in my right side as a mimicker. The article talks about how infants' attention coalesce around often repeated sounds. I believe my visual attention coalesced around the right half of other's faces to the extent that I still really do not see the left half of a person's face unless I specifically look for it.

"The study provided evidence that learning for the infant brain is not a passive process. It requires human interaction-a necessity that I call "social gating"...The experience of a young child learning to talk, in fact, resembles the way birds learn song"

"These ideas about the social component of early language learning may also explain some of the difficulties encountered by infants who go on to develop such disorders such as autism. Children with autism lack basic interest in speaking. Instead they fixate on inanimate objects and fail to pay attention to social cues so essential in language learning."

'Social gating' sounds similar to open instinct to me.

A recent discussion on Democracy Now( turn off sound if not interested in discussion) has Andrew Bacevich, scholar and retired soldier, discussing recent political events. It appears evident to me that he has more visual cues displayed on the right half of his face than the left. As an infant I think there would have been more connections to be made with and mimicked that would help establish the dominance of the one cerebral hemisphere. It would also suggest that my trying to learn to perceive and use my 'left tongue' is a lot larger and probably more difficult than I had originally thought.



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