Through The TED Talk: A Conceptual Analysis

A three year old immigrant has to learn two languages, their native language and the official language for their new country. For an adult this is a hard task, however, for a three year old child this task is easy and before they know two different languages are being used in a conversation. However, why is this? Why are infants and kids in early childhood able to learn a new language with much ease? These questions have yet to completely be answered by scientists. It’s something they are all in agree to, kids, in their younger years are more able to learn languages (Kuhl, 2010). Through the help of a TED Talk, The Linguistic Genius of Babies by Patricia Kuhl, it was possible to get some of these answers along with the textbook Infancy by Alan Fogel. …show more content…
Patricia Kuhl was able to express in her TED Talk that children are “citizens of the world” meaning that they are not biased by culture (2010). This enable them to want to focus on different sounds without wanting to just focus on the native sounds. Through constant exposure infants eventually begin to recognize certain sounds to certain groups. The possibility to recognize this languages makes infants also be described as “universal language perceivers” meaning that because they are not culture based yet, infants can more accurately tell apart “sound contrast from many different languages” (Fogel, 2014, pp. 259). This is why there are many children who exposed to two languages at an early age can learn both of these languages. Yet, the later you introduce a second language there might be a bigger challenge for the infant to learn the new