Think about how you hear a language you don't understand, like Hebrew or Japanese, he says. To your ear, it may sound like a garble. But if you can isolate each word, and understand its meaning, learning the language is far easier, he says. Brent admits one limitation of his study is that all the mothers involved had undergraduate or graduate degrees. He says his next step will be to work with mothers who are not as highly educated.
Bloom agrees more study is necessary.
But what he has to show is if it's true of all humans. The same type of programs that can break the code of patterns, and pattern recognition, Brent says, could help decipher the genomes of humans and other species. Instinctively, parents use this type of speech. It's just important to talk to your kids. To learn more about language acquisition, visit the ThinkQuest Web site.