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March 4, 2016
Q. What language do most of us first learn as infants, on our way to becoming fully communicative adults?
A. It could be any of the world's 7,000 languages but most of us get a social start by learning “parentese” from Mom and Dad, says early childhood learning specialist Patricia Kuhl in Scientific American magazine. It's exaggerated talk, you might say, using high pitch, slower tempo and exaggerated intonation. When given a choice of various audio clips, infants chose these over other recordings by women speaking to other adults. “The high pitched tone seems to act as an acoustic hook for infants that captures and holds their attention.”
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