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johnsonel7

What Twins Can Teach Us About Nature vs. Nurture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-about-nature-vs-nurture.html

nature research

shared by johnsonel7 on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Although they shared all their genes and grew up with the same adoring parents, clearly there were differences in these boys that had been influenced by other factors in their environment, both prenatal and postnatal.
  • The relative importance of nature and nurture to how a child develops has been debated by philosophers and psychologists for centuries, and has had strong — and sometimes misguided — influences on public policy.
  • “Genes define your potential, but your environment largely determines how you turn out. The few who escape negative influences are outliers.
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  • “In an individual person, the contributions of genes and the environment are inestimable,” she explained, “but on a population basis we can estimate how much person-to-person variation is explained by genetic and environmental differences.”
johnsonel7

Do Babies Cry in Different Languages? - NYT Parenting - 0 views

parenting.nytimes.com/...prespeech-development-wurzburg

research language nature vs nurture

shared by johnsonel7 on 18 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds, had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.
  • In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,” reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are already influenced by their mother tongue.
  • After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.
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  • The 2-month-old with hearing problems also makes a leap. Nine days after receiving a hearing aid, his irregular, choked cries have given way to confident experiments with vowel sounds.
  • All parents, Dr. Wermke said, have an innate ability to understand and respond to their babies. Indeed, it was mothers who supported her research from the beginning, even as other scientists were skeptical. In the 1980s, when Dr. Wermke first began recording babies’ sounds, many researchers viewed crying as a mere biological alarm signal, worth investigating only in the context of problems such as colic. But mothers never doubted that their tiny babies were worth studying. As Judith Fricke, little Joris’s mother, said, “I think you’d recognize the sound of your own child among a hundred others. You develop an ear for that.”
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