Working in Movement

Babies move to learn almost everything they do. Language is no exception. But when most of us think of movements a baby makes in while learning language, we might first think of movements of that produce sound. Lots of sound.

What the baby learns to look at also plays a crucial role. If babies follow gaze early, language learning improved reports on University of Washington study that looked at (no pun) the effect of 11 and 12 month old babies learning to follow the gaze of an adult, and the impact on number of words understood a few months later.

"Although the babies are too young to talk to us, those individual babies who are most attuned to our eye gaze are the same babies who pick up language faster more than half a year later," said (UW psychologist Andrew) Meltzoff. "This is a fascinating connection between the social and linguistic world and suggests that language acquisition is supported by preverbal social interaction.

"To do this a baby has an important social regularity to master: follow mom's eyes and you can discover what she is talking about. This study shows that babies first master this social information between 10 and 11 months of age, and it may be no coincidence that there is a language explosion soon thereafter. It is as if babies have broken the code of what mom is talking about and words begin pouring out of the baby to the parents' delight," he said.

It's not surprising to me that eye movements play such an important role in development and beyond. I'd bet other research might also show movements associated with other senses play an important role too.

This all assumes an environment that gives the baby opportunities to develop this gaze-following behavior and take advantage of it. Environment and behavior are inseparable. And that bring back the old nature vs. nurture debate.

Although I've just started reading it, What's Not in Your Genes gets at this from the perspective of reviewing Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human by Matt Ridley.

At first it might seem that Ridley is making the banal claim that there's no learning without brains and no brains without genes. All culture is therefore genetic but in the trivial sense that gray matter requires genetic matter. Though Ridley does slip into such platitudes now and then ("you need nature to be able to absorb nurture"), his real point is bigger and more sophisticated. It is this: study of the human genome has revealed that genes respond to experience.

"Genes respond to experience" and experience can't be separated from the environment in which it takes place. So, while physical movements are part of everything we do in life, so is the context in which we do it.