Absolute pitch and approximation

Absolute pitch (sometimes called perfect pitch) is the ability of individuals to name pitches they hear, or to produce a tone in response to a given pitch name.

I recall years ago experimenting with a friend of mine, a composer/conductor/pianist who had a remarkably developed sense of absolute pitch. I sat at the piano, and plunked 6 or 8 keys. Almost without fail he named every last one of them, and was pretty good at noting their octaves as well. Another friend, a répétiteur (essentially a pianist or keyboardist who assists singers in learning their roles, and accompanies them in performances) was rather distraught because the orchestra tuning was "nearly a quarter-tone sharp".

Plantinga & Trainor ("Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code," Cognition 98 (2005): 1-11) write:

Historically, absolute pitch processing was of interest because some considered it to be a coveted musical ability. In fact, focusing on absolute pitch information may be a hindrance... Interestingly, monkeys and birds, which have not developed music and langauge, rely to a greater extent on absolute pitch than on relative pitch encoding... From this perspective, the ability to encode relative pitch ... is a more sophisticated ability than remembering absolute pitch.

How can that be, you might ask. Think of it this way, relative pitch is the ability to approximate, to see similarity across variation, to identify patterns despite differences. Absolute pitch can be seen in this regard as a distinct inability to approximate, or perhaps more precisely, an inability to shift focus in the process of attending to sound. This ability to shift focus, to find salience in different aspects of the same signal is essential to our abilities in the world.

An infant listening to fluent speech has a myriad of factors to abstract. Think of a common scenario of verbal correction. The other day, the following was to be heard in my house:

Wife (to #2): show daddy what you found.
Me (to #2): What did you found?
#1 (3;9): No, daddy. Not "what did you found"... what did you FIND!

Corrections like this occur all the time. A transcription fails to represent all the essentials however. What is the difference between written language and speech? The most prominent features that are lost are pitch and timing. An infant learning speech acquires not only words and their syntax, but the prosodic content as well. In corrections, what must often be foregrounded are these prosodic cues, in order to comprehend the intended message.

Ideally, we will have access to pitch in both absolute and relative terms. It has been documented (as Plantinga & Trainor note as well) that under certain circumstances just about all of us retain absolute pitch processing. If we hear a familiar song always performed at the same pitch level, we are likely to store that song in absolute terms. If we are asked to sing it, with no other cues, we are likely to begin on the right pitch. Often musicians lacking absolute pitch are known to have a similar ability only for their given instrument. (Sometimes, this skill is confusingly termed relative pitch). A guitarist or violinist may be quite able to tune their own instrument without assistance, but not be able to identify the same pitch when played on another instrument.

Cognitive flexibility is one of our finest skills, and one which we should cultivate in our children. When you correct your child's speech, pay attention to the various aspects of the signal that you are producing. Do you slow down or speed up at certain points? Where does the pitch change? Are you creating an accent on a given word? How do you mark this accent, by raised or lowered pitch, by increased amplitude, by tempo change, by breathiness or nasality?

The child must learn not only to understand the words in an utterance and their order, but also these prosodic cues. Hearing the same words, in the same order, but with altered intonational and timing contours will help the child learn to focus on these different aspects of the sound, aiding their ability to shift focus between them. Being aware of your signalling behaviors makes you more able to cater the signal for its intended effect.

With prelinguistic children, you can invent games that foreground these aspects. Say a phrase or sentence with a normal or unmarked intonation. Then alter it, emphasizing different words, or making a statement into a question, or a question into a request. You can also speak more quickly or slowly, with an even flow of time or a disjunct one. Playing with different accents can be fun as well. But bear in mind that you may be altering both the phonetic content as well as the intonational. So playing with accents might be best used after the child is familiar with the game.

Try to make eye contact, and if you can, get the child to watch your mouth as you speak. Bear in mind that your facial gestures are major cues as well. Raising or lowering your eyebrows, or closing your eyes, while silent, can serve as important cues to meaning.

First 5 California

Here's a similar program in California to the one in Minnesota mentioned below. The California Children and Families Commission sponsors a program called First 5 California, whose mission is to provide... all children prenatal to five years of age with a comprehensive, integrated system of early childhood development services.

Ready 4 K

Just heard about this program in Minnesota, on the Al Franken Show. Al was interviewing an economist who works for the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, in which capacity he is an advocate for early childhood development, arguing this case on the basis of return on investment, providing detailed statistics on the social economic benefits of birth-five educational programs for at-risk families. At-risk is always a buzz word. He defined it mostly in terms of poverty, but said that even going 200% over the poverty level, children, families and society would benefit from these programs. I might go a bit further myself, believing that in American society we might all benefit from a social support network to aid us in parenting skills, and in understanding more about childhood development.

Observation

As parents, we need to be good observers. Our children go through the world devouring experience and knowledge with the appetite of a swarm of locusts. If we're not paying close attention, we're bound to miss a lot of it. Some of the best science is done by sheer force of observation.

Too often the "scientific method" is described as first hypothesis; second testing; third confirmation. But what fails to be acknowledged is the importance of observation in the first place. If our hypotheses are to be meaningful, they must derive from something in the real world, in many cases they are motivated simply by astute observations.

I went for a walk with the boys this morning. The 13-month old wanted to walk most of the way himself, hoping to wander off as possible. (He was an early walker, about 10 months. His older brother was more cautious, on the verge of walking for months, but not taking his first steps until he was almost a year old.) Number two discovered something about our neighbors' yards. The first three houses we passed all had steps in the front, and a path leading off to the driveway on the left.

He enjoys climbing up steps, but wanted to take a detour when he got up. The first yard obliged him. At the second, he did the same, even though there was a railing there by the driveway, which I lifted him over. At the third, the path was hidden to my view, until I walked around to the driveway. He was elated.

What was evident was that he had formed an expectation based on his experience at the first house. It was confirmed at the second, even though it was a bit different. By the third, this expectation was strongly reinforced. A little later, we arrived at another house from the other direction, where he walked up the driveway, to discover the path led to the left toward the steps, rather than the right, as he expected. He wrinkled his nose, walked down the path, then proceeded to turn around and around at the top step.

Perhaps it was in part his preference to climb up than down (though he gladly does both). I suspect however, that he was indicating to me his confusion or delight at discovering something new. Recall how quickly children can learn from experience (cf. the citation for Saffran et al., below). They are statistical sampling wizards. Three in a row, with no countering evidence? That's pretty strong confirmation.

Playing with contrasts

One controversial idea in the raising of children is the idea that the child should direct their own learning. Of course there are many ways to take that, and many ways to misconstrue it. The reality is that children, especially young children, will learn mostly only what they are disposed to learn. But they will also only learn that which they are exposed to.

We can lead children to certain experiences, but we cannot determine what it is they will take away from them. Play, especially one on one with a caregiver, is one of the best ways for them to learn. By creating a constrained but varied environment for play, we help them to learn, and us to understand what they are learning.

For example, one can play with opposites and contrasts. Get a small shoe box or something similar with a lid that the child can manipulate. Get a variety of objects that relate to one another but differ in some clear way. Try to keep the contrasts as simple as possible, at least at first. For instance, get two balls: one red, and one blue; or one large and one small; small figures: one of a dog, the second a horse; or a white cat, and a brown one. Have a whole collection of these objects, but for each contrast keep it to one or two varieties, so that the contrast itself is as clear as possible. (Just make sure that the objects are age-appropriate and do not represent choking hazards.)

Many household item will serve as well: a wooden spoon and a metal or rubberized one; a blue storage lid, and a pink one. Often with storage lids, the colors correspond to different sizes or shapes, so for example, the blue lids may be smaller than the pink ones, or the blue ones will be rectangular, and the green ones round. Begin with the simpler contrasts, where only one feature varies if possible. Then, slowly introduce the objects that vary along several dimensions.

Just let the child play with the objects and the box. They will be learning about inside/outside, open/close, visible/hidden, as well as the contrasts of the objects themselves. In fact, there's no telling just how many things they'll be learning from the game. As they gain more experience with this activity, they will begin forming expectations about the experience. You can play with this by mixing things up. Play with the spoons for a while, then slip some other object in there. You may see their eyes open wide, or hear a laugh, to express their surprise that something else appeared.* That's a good sign that they are forming expectations, testing their hypotheses.

Just be patient, and enjoy their process of playing. Don't be afraid to repeat the same procedure, with the same objects, over and over. You may be surprised at how long they will play this game. If they don't take to the game right away however, just put it away in your mind for a while, and try again in a few weeks or a month.

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* An interesting, related article on recent research is by Rechele Brooks and Andrew N. Meltzoff (Brooks & Meltzoff, "The development of gaze following and its relation to language," Developmental Science 8:6 (2005), pp. 535–543). Their findings show that 10-11 month olds who vocalized simultaneously when gaze-sharing with an adult were more advanced linguistically at 18 months. The procedure involved open- versus closed-eye conditions for the adults. The findings showed that 9-month olds seem oblivious to whether an adult's eyes are open or closed when looking at an object.

In contrast, 10- and 11-month-olds sharply differentiate these two conditions. The majority of the older infants look at the adult’s target specifically when the adult turns with open eyes (and refrain when she turns with closed eyes). The 10- and 11-month-olds are closely monitoring the adult’s perceptual organs. (540)

Further, regarding simlutaneous vocalization during shared eye gaze, they write:

The findings concerning vocalization provide additional data concerning the proposed developmental shift. In a sense, the infants themselves could be telling us that they are linking the looker with the object. The significant finding is that by 11 months, but not at 9 months, infants are adding simultaneous vocalizations to their target looks in the open-eyes condition and rarely doing the same in the closed-eyes condition. (540)

As they put it:

...the current results lend support to the theoretical arguments ... and empirical findings ... suggesting that gaze following plays a role in language acquisition. In the current study, correct gaze following plus simultaneous vocalization predicted later vocabulary comprehension and gesture production, but general vocalization alone (without looking at the target) did not. (540-541)

Directing

A few years back I saw a production of Verdi's opera Rigoletto. It's the story of a hunchback court jester, who has a beautiful young daughter he keeps tucked away at home, away from meddling eyes. She knows nothing of his "day job". One day, however, some of the guys at court, who have long been the brunt of his acrid wit, discover that he has a daughter. They kidnap her. The scene that follows has all the men at court taunting Rigoletto.

In any case, the director of the opera decided it would be a great idea if all the men in this scene, save Rigoletto himself, were to carry these massive calla lilies. I mean they had three-foot long stalks, and flowerheads about 10 inches across. They sang their ditty, then in synchrony all tossed their flowers to the ground. Subtle, you know, Gilda was Rigoletto's flower and all ... implication of deflowering and the like. You get it. The flowers remained on stage for the next hour of the show, meaning every character in every scene had to gingerly step around them, or trip over them, creating quite an amusing sideline to the essential action of the show.

Another time, I went to see a production of Beethoven's only opera Fidelio. Suffice it that the character Florestan is a political prisoner hidden away in a dungeon. His wife Leonora pretends to be a boy Fidelio and takes on employment as an assistant to the prison keeper.

Typically, the dungeon door plays some role in the staging, especially as the opening of the dungeon door symbolizes freedom for the prisoners. But in this production, the door was so dominant, that I had trouble looking or thinking about anything else. At one point, two extras slowly open the door, which was raked on the stage. The thing was about 25 or 30 feet across, so opening it was no mean feat. Instead of paying attention to the music and the story, I found myself wondering whether they would actually get it open without incident.

Why am I telling you this? The point in both cases is the same. Something minor, something supplemental was given spotlight treatment, which detracted from the more important elements. Because the gestures were so large, they were lent a degree of salience that was not warranted. The audience was led to the door and the flowers as if they were the prime movers of the story.

The director had failed. In many ways, we play the role of director in our children's lives. We set the stage, and highlight the characters and events that strike us as most important. Taking the larger picture, stepping back from the moment, and deciding what one or two things to take away from each experience is something we can do, that will help our children learn, and aid us in a shared understanding with them.

As a child grows, they develop an interest in shared attention, which is most evident in manual pointing. Prelinguistic children, and those in the one-word stage just love to point at objects like the moon, or an animal, sometimes accompanying the gesture with a one-word label. They delight in sharing their experience with us. Parents and caregivers often reciprocate, reinforcing the behavior. But experience, like stage action, is complex. Everything is all together. The job of a director, and our job as parents, is to aid the audience or child to learn to background and foreground different elements.

One way I've heard autism described is an inability to weed out the distracting noise of life. One way we can help our children, is to guide their attention to particular aspects of their experience and the environment around them.

Baloon keep-up

If you've read any of my posts, you'll know that I harp a lot on patterns in the environment. Patterns allow us to make predictions and devise expectations about the world around us. But we need sufficient exposure to these patterns to develop our own understandings of them (sometimes called folk theories). Tonight I played a little game with my three-year-old and my one-year-old. The differences in their performance were telling about the differences in their experience.

We have an old air-filled balloon laying around the house. Both boys love baloons. So, we tossed it into the air, and tried to keep it aloft. The three-year-old very much enjoyed the game, and was quite adept at it. He likes to make up his own rules in games (like Calvin from the comic strip). He explained how each one of us had to hit it twice, or three times, and that the winner was the one who got it to land on the piano.

But, the little one, well, he was having trouble. He saw the balloon, and chased it. Every time it went up, he'd look around the wrong way. Where did it go? He was our valiant ball boy, though, retrieving it off the floor, whenever it landed.

The problem is that he hasn't had enough experience with flying things and gravity. The balloon behaves a bit differently from other objects he's spent a lot of time with. Most things when you throw them up, they fall down quickly. But the balloon seems to hover a bit, like Michael Jordan by the net. Balloons are only slightly heavier than air, and produce a great deal of drag, meaning ... let's just say Newton's prediction would not have been confirmed if he dropped a balloon and an apple from the tower.

So, my little 13-month old hasn't yet come up with appropriate predictions for the behavior of balloons, while the 45-month old has. For now, balloon motion is a wonderful stochastic event that he'll just have to study up on for a while.

A word about Baby Sign

Here's something Laura Ann Petitto had to say in 2000 (p. 456, citation below):

Our intensive study of these hearing babies acquiring only signed languages in early life surprised us. These babies achieve all linguistic milestones on a normal maturational time table. If early human language acquisition were wholly determined neurologically by the mechanisms for speech production and reception, then these hearing babies raised without systematic spoken language stimulation should show atypical patterns of language acquisition. Instead, all of these groups of hearing babies produced manual babbling, first signs, first two-signs, and other milestones, at the same time as is seen in all other children, be they hearing acquiring speech or Deaf acquiring sign.

What are the ramifications for teaching hearing babies of hearing parents sign language? There is quite a buzz these days about it, with the argument stated that babies acquire sign more rapidly than speech. So what gives? Let's do a little thought experiment to think about it.

Let's say your baby is exposed to spoken English every day, all the time. The parents speak English, the radio chatter is in English. People at the grocery store speak English.

But let's say, you know a dozen words in Swahili. Words like: milk, cracker, mommy, hungry, diaper, more. And let's say you carefully expose your child to these words, which are unusual for you to articulate, taking extra special care in pronouncing them.

I am willing to bet you an "I love my daddy" bib that your child will acquire those words more easily and more quickly than they do the equivalent words in English. But why?

It comes down to exposure of easily identifiable and repeatable symbols of communication. I do not doubt that hearing infants of hearing parents exposed to a spare few signs will acquire those signs more readily, or possibly devise their own forms of home sign. My one-year-old sometimes extends his arm fully, holding his thumb and forefinger together, while making eye contact. This seems to mean [give] or something to that effect. What makes it stick is an appropriate response from us.

The same thing can be said for spoken words. An infant babbles. Sometimes the babbling takes a form recognizable to adults: ma... bbbbbbb.... maba...ma.... "Yes," we say, "mommy.... mmmmoooommmyy." The child enjoys the interaction, and eventually repeats the sounds in more and more specific contexts.

Of course, [mommy] to the infant could mean "milk" or "breast" or "warm snuggle" or on occasion "mommy". The word becomes acquired by attaching context and content to the arbitrary symbol. A baby acquiring baby sign has the advantage of a highly constrained set of symbols, which are only presented in rarified contexts.

If it is useful for you, do it. Think about the process, and try to apply it more broadly. Who knows, maybe your baby will like learning a little Swahili too.

To what is a baby predisposed?

Here's a little tidbit for you to contemplate. Laura Ann Petitto and colleagues have studied language acquisition by children exposed to both spoken and signed language inputs (Petitto, Laura Ann, “On the biological foundations of human language,” in Emmorey et al, Eds., The Signs of Language Revisited, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000). While some theories have posited that the human animal is predisposed toward spoken language by its neurological and physiological structure, it has never been clear what these theorists consider language to be. The first matter of defining our subject has too often simply been skirted. It has been tacitly assumed that language means speech. From this, many theories have been hatched explaining some of the changes to human physiology in terms of their selection for speech.

For example, Philip Lieberman (Lieberman, Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior, Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1991.) has long argued that bipedalism in humans was the result of selective pressures for a descended larynx which permits non-nasalized vocalizations. The argument is that speech is such an advantage that it counters the detriments caused by a descended larynx, in particular the likelihood of choking.

The argument has always been based on the assumption that the two (choking and speech) are the relevant countering forces, driving the evolution of bipedalism. Let's step back from this for a minute and take a closer look at language.

Petitto and her colleagues indicate that many of the same neural substrates are shared for both speech and sign, even for specific brain regions (in particular the Planum Temporale that had been thought exclusively to play a role in auditory processing). To put it simply, parts of the brain that were previously seen as part of hearing, are exposed to play a role for soundless language.

As she writes (p. 470):

Rather that being exclusively hard-wired for speechor sound, the young of our species are initially hardwired to detect aspects of the patterning of language.

The point to be taken from this is that our assumptions regarding language have been flawed. Human language, and for that matter much of human culture, is characterized by patterns, whether in sound or movement, or what have you. It is the task of infants to identify and make sense of these patterns. The more the patterns are identifiable and repeatable, the easier their task becomes.

Holophrasis

An early stage in language development is called the holophrastic stage, meaning a single word serves the function of an entire phrase. "Ball" could mean "look there's a ball," or "that ball is red too," or "I want to play with a ball," and on.

Some theories about language development state that once enough words are accumulated, suddenly syntax begins to emerge. This has been applied both developmentally (ontogenetically) and evolutionarily (phylogenetically). These theorists suppose that human language developed in the species (reflected in the trajectory of individuals today) when a growing vocabulary reached a critical mass, and voilá grammar appeared.

My own views are somewhat different. One way to present the difference is a contrast between synthesis and analysis. The view that we begin with naming (especially of objects), then we link these things together, eventually leading to mature syntax, is the view that language is at base a combining of elements (synthesis). An example of this might be: ball, my, red, fun ... "my red ball fun". But how do we explain holophrasis? How do we get from "ball" to "my ball" to "my red ball fun" eventually to "my red ball is fun to play with"?

I would argue that language emerges more as analysis than synthesis. Quite likely a child's language (and by analogy the development of language in the species) comes about through first grasping medium-sized concepts, assigning labels to these, then moving on through analysis to ever more specific (on the other end, more general) ideas. Thus, as a child acquires a word such as doggie, the word may at first be applied also to cows and cats and sheep. The category becomes more specific as more experience is accumulated, and as more words are obtained or invented to cover these distinctions.

Thus, dog is revised as dog/cat/cow/sheep; perhaps also the supercategories of pet and animal are surmised and their labels assigned; and perhaps also lower level distinctions are made, either of individual animals (Spot, Harlequin, Tom, Fluffy) or of classes (Poodle, Greyhound, St. Bernard). Certainly this doesn't all happen at once, nor rapidly, nor necessarily in this order. The point however is that analysis from hazy concepts to more specific ones, reflected in language as a move from vague, broad symbols, to more-finely expressed ones is the likely process.

Evolutionarily, it is assumed therefore, regardless of how the first words arose (which I make no effort to try to reconstruct), new words were devised as experience and communicative intent made them necessary. If a hominid culture had but one tool, tool could suffice to describe their technology. But as their repertoire of tools grew, one needed to distinguish between a tool for cutting, one for digging, and one for crushing.

I view the child's task as similar. The major difference is language already exists. The child's experience is not only an attempt to make sense of the world, but also to make sense of the behaviors of people in it, who have a metacognitive ability to consider and communicate about these experiences. The greater their experience, the more they are able to dissect their concepts, and to realize distinctions in language use. The relationship between language and thought is not entirely clear. It is difficult to sustain the view that language is necessary for thought. However, one thing is certain, language permits the outward expression of our inner thoughts, giving us perhaps the only immutable (albeit it at times difficult to decipher) evidence of the nature of these thoughts.

Here's a rundown of the theory I sustain. We begin with a single symbol representing a broad range of ideas. It is assumed that a child's early thinking about the world (and much of our thinking subsequently) is rather hazy and nonspecific. Experience is complicated. We at first relate a word to an experience as a whole. The more often this or similar circumstances are repeated, we are able to focus on different aspects of the whole, drawing out various portions into our conscious attention. As we do this, we find the need for greater distinctions in our thinking, reflected as well in our use of language.

The infant begins with "ball" representing a whole range of potential scenarios containing a ball. While adult language may view this word as a noun, representing a concrete object in the world, it is unlikely however that the initial acquisition of a word at this stage is of the same type. Ball to a young language-learner is not a discreet object, so much as a variety of experience.

The main lesson to take away from this, regarding our parenting, is that we should not assume the child's first use of a word corresponds neatly with our own usage. We should work to become aware of the complexity of circumstances in which a given word is used, and understand the child's task to be abstracting from this broad experience an ever more detailed understanding both of the world, and of human culture and language.

By repeating and varying these circumstances, and using similar and subtly varied language, we aid the child in their quest toward knowledge and understanding.

Reflect back and vary

When children begin to interact with us, they thrive on our responses. Studies have been done (sorry I don't have the references handy) that show children respond more favorably to a live interactant than to a recording (even if the recording is of them interacting with someone earlier). No big surprise there.

They want to see and hear our immediate reactions to what it is they do. With younger children, they love to hear you or see you repeat back what they have just said or done: monkey see, monkey do. This helps them to understand your perception of their action. It helps them to focus attention on the aspects of their behavior that you find most salient. And it aids them in developing a sense of recognition for similarities, since what you do will not be exactly what they did.

Many of us instinctively do this. An infant says: ba-BA-da-da-da, and we repeat ba-BA-da-da-da. (Pay attention to the intonation and rhythm). We should continue this sort of thing as their speech becomes more articulate. Again, partly we do this naturally. The 18-month old says: "baw baw" ... we reply, "yes, that's a ball". For hearing children, it is helpful for them to see how we form these sounds as well. Say, "look at daddy, look at daddy," point to your mouth, repeating slowly "ball", then say more naturally, "you're right, that's a ball." (For signing children, help them form the shapes with their hands, or let them rest their hands on top of yours as you sign.)

This helps the child to become aware of the process of speaking. It gives them visual cues that link to their auditory and kinesthetic cues. As they develop further, repeat and vary, "ball, you're right, that's a ball, a round ball". Introduce new words and concepts along with the familar words they know: ball, round, circle, sphere, globe. Don't ever believe that complicated words and abstract concepts are too hard for a child. The trick is to build things up systematically, to repeat a word or idea within a given context, to relate it to other words and ideas.

Make a game of it. My three-year-old just loves the word nonsequitur. I tried to explain the concept: "it's when you have a group of things and one doesn't belong... it just doesn't follow ... it's not part of the sequence ... like, tomato, apple, cucumber, WINDOW!" He'd squeal with delight. "Window" he would randomly spout out throughout the day, and giggle, "non-se-qui-tur" he'd add. I'm not sure he fully gets it. But his attempts now get closer and closer to what I might say. Most importantly, this sort of thing is play with words, and it gives them a chance to feel at home with words, even "big words," and to see them as tools they can use, rather than scary uncertainties.

But never overestimate your own ability to foresee what it is they get from what you say. They might not learn all the words you use, but they abstract information from your speaking that helps them in many ways. For instance, they may see patterns emerge that teach them how words are put together, their morphological structure. They hear you pluralize nouns, and mark the tense of verbs. All of this information goes in. It often comes out garbled, but these bumps work themselves out.

We are often told to read to our children. Indeed we should. But we should talk to them as well. And we should play with them in other ways that make them aware of patterns and imitation. Get a drum (it can be an empty coffee can, or a pot and a wooden spoon). Encourage them to play. Imitate what they do as best you can. If they thump twice, you thump twice. They'll find the game delightful, and eventually they'll get the imitation. They'll observe the patterns you do.

If they like to draw, give them one crayon, and you take another. When they draw a curve, you draw a curve. When they dot the page, you dot the page. All of this is teaching them to see things the way you see them. And it's teaching them to interact socially.

Rhythms (in utero)

A fetus, as has been well documented, is quite capable of gleaning many things for their world. Their world however is rather limited in scope. Where are the patterns? The mother moves through the world in rhythmic ways. Her heart beats in regular thump-thumps. When she speaks or sings, the fetus can feel the vibrations. (See Mehler & Dupoux, What Infants Know, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994, for more discussion.)

A mother is at a distinct advantage in the newborn's life, since nine months have prepared the child for recognizing and understanding her patterns. They can generalize these patterns as well. Studies have been done of a young child's ability to notice and respond to differences in rhythmic organization between their native language and one which does not share the same rhythmic structure. For instance, see Mehler, Jacques, Peter Jusczyk, Ghislaine Lambertz, Nilofar Halsted, Josiane Bertoncini, and Claudine Amiel-Tison. "A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants." Cognition 29 (1988): 143-78.

What more can we do as parents? When my wife was pregnant (when she was comfortable and obliging), I would gently tap rhythmic patterns on her belly. The procedure was similar to the one described below for syllables. tim-tim-tam tim-tim-tam tim-tim-tam tim-tim-tam ... tim-tim-tim-tam tim-tim-tim-tam tim-tim-tim-tam. For those of you literate in music notation, here is what it might look like.



Repeat the patterns. Then vary. Then return to the original, repeat, and vary. Try to keep it simple, especially at first. The point of this exercise is to help the fetus become aware of paying attention to a certain type of stimulus. A mother can also take advantage of the captive audience to begin a simplified version of the syllables exercise, bearing in mind that mostly what gets through is rhythmic information. However, rather than tapping on her belly, which may annoy her, she can simply intone these patterns with her voice. Or she can move rhythmically, which may have the added advantage of helping fit in some exercise: step-step-step-rest step-step-step-rest step-step-step-rest step-step-step-rest-step-rest step-step-step-rest-step-rest. Keep it simple, repeat, vary.

Babbling

Every normally-developing child (and for that matter the overwhelming majority of delayed-developing children) acquire the language to which they are exposed. Language cannot develop without exposure to it. It matters not whether this language is spoken or signed. (cf. Laura Ann Petitto, "On the Biological Foundations of Human Language," inThe signs of language revisited, 2000.) What matters really is the ability of the child to abstract repeatable symbols from a mass of input. In simplified terms, they have to identify the individual elements, such as letters or handshapes, that combine to make up words.

Children, whether speaking or signing, go through a stage of babbling, essentially experimenting with their mouths or hands to form a battery of possibly meaningful symbols. Interestingly, an infant normally produces symbols that go beyond the signs permissible in the language to which they are exposed. Think of getting a new radio, with a variety of dials, knobs, and switches. We tweak them all, producing novel configurations. Sometimes the result is a well-defined signal, sometimes mere static. Babbling is like tweaking the dials, knobs, and switches of the child's language producing apparatus.

The task for an infant is to figure out how to focus their attention, as well as how to approximate and imitate the elements of language. This is no mean task. In the child's biological favor is a specially-evolved ability to select out certain types of information. For instance, researchers in Canada have identified selective neuron activity, which occurs only in the presence of human vocal sounds. See Belin, et al., “Voice-selective areas in human auditory cortex,” Nature 43 (20 January 2000): 309-312. An interesting question (so far unanswered) would be if there is similar brain activity involved in the processing of human hand gestures.

How does this translate practically for us as parents? We are in a unique position as the principal producers of input in our children's early lives, the most flexible and perhaps most critical stage in their brains' development. If an infant is tasked with observing repeatable patterns, we can assist them by directing our production to this task. I will give some ideas from spoken language, but this can be modified for sign as well.

Here is a simple, but powerful exercise you can engage in. In a calm moment, preferably several times a day, spend a few minutes repeating a syllable, then varying it. For instance: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba da-da-da-da-da-da-da; si-si-si-si-si-si-si-si-si so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so.

In linguistic terms, these are what are called minimal pairs, two related units that ostensibly vary only along one dimension. But language is complex. For instance, one difference between writing and speech is that every spoken utterance includes pitch and timing, both of which are absent from the written version. So, we can vary this element as well. For example, present a syllable on a consistently low pitch ku-ku-ku-ku-ku-ku, then vary it by repeating the same syllable on a high pitch ku-ku-ku-ku-ku-ku. Or modify the pitch as falling the first time, then rising in the repeats.

The more patience you have in repeating, then varying, returning to the original, then the variation, and on, the more you will assist your child in identifying the aspects to which you wish to draw their attention. Speak slowly and clearly, but naturally, and learn to observe the subtle and mostly unconscious variation that you normally produce. Don't try to speak like a computer. We want your child to learn to be human, not robotic. The subtle variants that emerge, for instance what linguists refer to as allophones, teach a child which features are transmutable and which are sacred in a given linguistic culture; that is, from the variation, they learn to identify similarity, a crucial developmental task.

Remember my comment above about the infant normally producing symbols outside their native language. We can take advantage of this as well. If you are adept at accents, try producing the syllables with different accents. As you go along, if you get bored with the simple syllables, come up with more complex sounds stra-stra-stra-stra ftra-ftra-ftra-ftra suplu-suplu-suplu-suplu-suplu guflu-guflu-guflu-guflu. Or you can present the simple repetitions for a few minutes, then a string of words that incorporate those same sounds go-go-go-go-go no-no-no-no-no gopher-going-ghost-goat noble-knowing-notebook-nope.

If you wish to expose your children to more than one language, repeat the exercise for each one. Some may say that you should work not to confuse the child. For instance, in some bilingual households, one parent speaks one language to the children, and the other the second. I'm not sure I subscribe to the strongest prohibitions in this regard, but to be safe, try not mixing the languages when you speak, as in "I have un poisson" or "Yo creo que daddy is home".

In general, the rule is find patterns; repeat patterns. Patterns will be a recurring theme in this blog.

Connection to behavior

Just came across a link between a child's behavior and cognitive development, which follows up on what I wrote below. Here is a quote from "How to Behave So Your Preschooler Will, Too!" by Sol Severe, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 109:

Preschoolers learn to make decisions by predicting the outcome of their actions. They must be able to see the relationship between cause and effect, how they behave and what happens to them... They need to know the consequences. Children will learn this cause-and-effect relationship more quickly when you behave consistently.

Of course, the same can be said (and in spades) about predicting how the world works. There is cause and effect everywhere around us. A child's task is to become aware of these, and to understand them. Consistent patterns in the world lead a child to formulating realistic hypotheses, and reinforcing or contradicting them by experience. How does this translate practically? I'll give you an example regarding child's play, to follow up on yesterday's post.

My three-year-old was given a toy when he was about a year old. It is a variation on a classic toy. He was to put a ball in a hole at the top of a spiral track, and watch it roll down. So far, so good. The problem is, the manufacturers insisted on adding features, namely flashing lights, and "music". The problem is, in the real world, (unless we live in a world of dominos), most of our actions result in a single, immediate response, that is a direct result of our input. But the pressing of the button at the top of the track results in anywhere from 3-10 seconds of noise and lights, none of which has much connection to the child's activity.

A child exposed to this sort of thing too often will have more difficulty formulating accurate expectations of the world. In contrast, if a child for instance hits a metal slat on a toy xylophon, the sound is brief, immediate, and in direct correlation with his own action, helping him to understand both his role in the world, and the result of his behavior. If she hits it harder, the sound will be louder and more abrupt. If he hits it with a soft mallet, a more dampened sound occurs. This sort of experimentation will lead the children more readily to understanding the world around them, and will aid them in developing cognitive skills.

Short of getting manufacturers to change their production practices, or designing our own line of children's toys, my advice is simple: take out the batteries!

Flashing, noisy child's toys

Why is it that parents are inundated with noisy, flashing toys, by manufacturers who wish to convince us that somehow their products will enhance our children's cognitive development? What is the truth in the matter? Do flashing lights and noises or "music" stimulate a child's cognition?

The first thing to recognize is that a child's brain is quite susceptible to stimulation. As I wrote below, an infant is not a blank slate at birth, but what the child begins with is more propensities than abilities. With the tools that nature has supplied, there are certain capacities that are more likely to emerge than others. Among these are the ability to walk on two legs and to speak a language. There are many others, but we are born with none of them. They emerge from the interaction between our biological endowment, and our interactions with the world.

The infant brain is remarkably adept at identifying patterns, and calculating probabilities from even a brief exposure to data. (See, for example, Saffran, Aslin & Newport, “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants,” Science 274, 13 December 1996). What this means is that if we expose our children to redundant sounds (and in the case of most recorded sounds, exact repetitions), rather than stimulating our children's brains, we are inurring them. The balance that must be achieved for optimal development is one between variety and repetition.

Put another way, the child is ever on the lookout for patterns. It is from these patterns that they formulate expectations: mini-hypotheses about how the world works. When our expectations are met, this reinforces our hypotheses; when they fail to be met, we modify the hypothesis, taking into account the variety we have observed. If the stimulus includes exact repetitions, of a sound for instance, like in the case of many electronic toys, the task for the child is easy and readily reinforced. The more the stimulus is repeated, the more established becomes the expectation. The downside of course, is that the child's brain may focus more and more on these easily formed and reinforced patterns, foresaking the more complicated ones. Most importantly, the more we are exposed to exact (or near exact) repetitions, the more difficulty we may have in recognizing similarity! But the recognition of similarity is a paramount skill for human development.

Years ago, I was a skeptic when it came to the surge in diagnoses of ADD and ADHD. I am much less of a skeptic now. I have begun to hypothesize that generations raised on simplistic stimuli as infants have greater difficulty concentrating for extended periods of time, or analyzing complicated streams of information. It is not a matter of them being stupid, simply a matter of the preparation they were given in early life.

Someone who apprentices in carpentry may be quite skilled in ways of the hammer and saw, but dangerously inept when put in a kitchen with a knife, or asked to plant tomatoes. Similarly, a brain raised on daily doses of MTV-like stimuli will be more attuned to these disjunct inputs, but will likely have less skill with more fluid ones. There is a saying in cognitive neuroscience: "neurons that fire together, wire together." This means that the more certain mental calculations are reinforced, the easier they become to process; contrarily the ones that have not been reinforced by experience become atrophied. It is this eventuality that we should ward against.