White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development
Address by Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl
Co-Director, Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning
July 26, 2001

The research described here is supported by grants to Patricia K. Kuhl from the National Institutes of Health, the Human Frontiers Science Program, the William P. and Ruth Gerberding Professorship, and the Talaris Research Institute.

I want to thank First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of Education Rod Paige, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, for convening this Conference. It calls attention to the country's most precious resource, our children.

I'm delighted to be here today to talk about early learning and the brain. It is an extraordinary time for this field. In the past decade, great progress was made in a variety of scientific fields -- genetics, biotechnology, and computer science. In this decade, a scientific information explosion is taking place in a new field -- early learning and brain development. We are studying the science of learning, and it is changing how we view a child's mind, and how we view a child's education.

There are three factors contributing to our fascination with children's learning.

Academic: The 1990s was the "Decade of the Brain." New technology was developed that allowed scientists, for the first time, to examine a living brain. It's not always been like this. When I was a graduate student we only had access to the secrets of the brain when it was sliced and viewed under a microscope. Now, we have all seen magazine articles picturing a brain that is "lit up" while its owner thinks, looks at a picture, or listens to music. If you're listening to me talk, I know which areas of your brain are activated. The new techniques are revealing, in a tangible way, how the brain really works.

Society: At the same time, studies of infants and children are showing that they learn more, and learn earlier, than we ever imagined. Children learn in novel ways that we hadn't predicted or expected -- I'll provide an example shortly. Studies show that from the earliest ages, children's brains code information that they see and hear. This happens automatically, without explicit instruction. These findings have been picked up by magazines, newspapers, and television documentaries -- and the public has a voracious appetite for it.

Business and industry have also taken notice of the new information about early learning. They know that children's learning will be influenced by technology and by the products that business provides. Education itself is undergoing a major transition, which is changing the face of the classroom. These factors all contribute to a growing interest in children's learning.

I want to tell you about four new developments that make a difference to children. First, I will describe new studies that reveal the incredible learning skills of young children. Second, I will tie infants' early language skills to reading readiness. Third, I will describe the developing brain. And fourth, I will describe new partnerships between researchers and educators that are bringing the research results into the nation's classrooms. There's a big gap between the neuron and the chalkboard, but the bridge can be crossed if the right people work together.

Studies of infants and young children show that learning doesn't begin the day children enter school for the first time. Learning doesn't begin in first grade, or in Kindergarten. Learning begins in the first months of life. And parents, or caretakers, are our children's first teachers.

Language Learning

The chief example I'll use today is language acquisition. Language is a hallmark of human beings, and scientists are beginning to understand exactly how the infant brain masters it. The surprise is that the infant brain acquires a tremendous amount of information about language in the first year of life before the infant can speak. Critical to today's discussion, this early learning plays a crucial role in laying the foundation for the ability to read. I'll use language as my primary example, but the kind of learning I'll describe is also true for other areas of cognitive development.

Language is made of building blocks -- the consonants and vowels that make up words. Every language uses a unique set of building blocks. Our studies show that, at birth, infants are what I like to call "citizens of the world." Early in life, infants can hear differences between all the consonants and vowels (the "building blocks") used in any language. Their abilities far exceed our own. As adults, we are no longer "citizens of the world." Instead, we are "culture-bound" listeners. We can hear distinctions between the sounds used in our own language but have great difficulty with the sounds of other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese or French. Infants can initially distinguish them all. But in order to learn a specific language, children have to learn the specific set of sounds used in that language. English is not Japanese.

To study this learning, I conduct studies in many different countries -- Japan, Russia, Sweden, Finland, and France -- testing infants and children from zero to five years of age. The studies show that by the age of 6 months, infants recognize the sound units used in their particular language. By 6 months, infants raised in Sweden respond in a very sophisticated way to the sounds of Swedish, and do not respond in that way to the sounds of English. American infants do the opposite -- they respond in that way to the sounds of English rather than those of Swedish. By 9 months, infants listening to English have learned which combinations of sounds are legal in English, and prefer them over ones appropriate for Polish or Dutch.

The learning going on isn't just simple memorization. Infants' brains make calculations based on the distribution of sounds they hear. It's as though infants are behaving like computers without their printers hooked up -- they store millions of bits of information before they can speak, simply by listening, and this tunes the infant brain to English rather than French. The amazing thing is that all of this happens so early in development. Before infants produce a single word, their little brains have mastered the sound patterns of language.

I want to show you how I conduct the studies. In this test a 6-month-old sits on her mother's lap and is entertained by a person holding toys. At the same time, a sound repeats from a loudspeaker, in this case the vowel /a, a, a/. The baby's job is to turn toward the loudspeaker when the sound changes, in this case, from /a/ to /i/. When she turns correctly, she sees a toy light up. Let's watch. (Show the video)

That was a really good baby.

As the infant brain masters its own language, something interesting happens. It becomes much more difficult for infants to distinguish the sounds used in a foreign language. I'll show you the results of a recent study I completed on American and Japanese infants. I tested them on two American English sounds, the /r/ and /l/ that distinguish English words like "rake" and "lake". The /r/ and /l/ sounds are not distinguished in Japanese, and Japanese adults have a great deal of difficulty with them, just as we do when we listen to foreign-language sounds.

I tested infants in the United States and Japan at two ages, 6 to 8 months, and 10 to 12 months. As shown in the slide, between 6 and 8 months, infants from the two countries are equally good at this task -- they perform well above chance. But by 10-12 months, just two months later, a big change has occurred. Infants in the US are getting much better at it, while the infants in Japan are considerably worse. Why does this happen? Because American children are listening to English and Japanese children are listening to Japanese. The baby brain is analyzing the sounds and discovering which ones the language uses. This early period is a "window of opportunity" for language, one in which the baby brain is learning at an extraordinary rate.

By 12 months of age, young infants are very focused on the patterns of their own language. They no longer respond to foreign languages like they did as young babies. Japanese babies no longer respond to the change from /r/ to /l/. The ability to distinguish foreign-language sounds has declined. Infants are becoming more adult-like and lose their status as "citizens of the world." They become more culture-bound, just like us. This specialization is essential for language learning, and illustrates how powerful early learning is.

By the time infants utter or understand their first words at one year of age, they have sorted out many of the components of language -- which sounds it uses, what sounds can be combined to create words, and the tempo and rhythm of words and phrases. The baby crib should have a sign on it: "Brain At Work" or "Scientist in the Crib"!

So if the brains of infants and children are altered by listening to us speak, what is it they are hearing? What kind of language do we use when we speak to children? We use what has been called "Motherese," or, now that we know fathers do it too, "Parentese," or, because you don't have to be a parent to produce it, "Caretakerese." Parentese is a unique, rather special sounding kind of speech we use when we talk to children.

It's definitely not your job interview voice. But infants and children love it. If you allow a young child to choose whether to listen to women speaking Parentese vs. those same women speaking to other adults, they will choose Parentese every time. It's the signal they prefer.

Parentese not only sounds better to children, we think it teaches them something. Parentese contains exaggerated, exceptionally well-formed phonetic units, and this makes it much easier for children to hear the essential differences. Language input to children is an enriched signal that makes it easier for children to learn. Keep talking to the baby brain.

Language and Reading

What is the connection between early language and reading? Studies show that children who have language problems often have difficulty learning to read. Others have specific reading problems. Language and reading require the sound analysis I've been talking about. Typically developing children can hear the differences between the "p" in "pat" and the "b" in "bat" or the "t" in "tall" and the "d" in "doll," but research shows that children with reading difficulties have trouble with this. There is some evidence to suggest that exaggerating the sounds, just as we do when we speak Parentese, can help older children with reading problems, but research on these kinds of intervention methods is just beginning.

Early diagnosis of children at risk for later language and reading problems may become easier in the future. We have a new study that shows that infants' abilities to distinguish speech sounds at 6 months of age, tested just as you saw in the video tape, predicts later language abilities.

The better infants are at distinguishing the building blocks of speech at 6 months, the better they are between 2 and 3 years of age, at other, more complex, language skills. Processing the building blocks of speech is essential. It's a bottleneck that most children get past, but that some do not. Since early speech skills predict later language skills, there is enormous hope that these tests will allow us to identify, very early, children who are "at risk" for later language difficulties. Early identification allows intervention.

The Developing Brain

I'd like to turn to the brain itself now. When you begin to take seriously that infants are the best learners in the universe, you start to ask, "what's going on up there?" As I mentioned, the new technology allows us to see adult brains at work. Well, we are beginning to see the infant brain at work, and there's no more fascinating brain than that of the young child.

The interesting thing about the infant brain is the fact that it forms its connections after birth. The trillion or so neurons that we all have in our brains are largely in place at birth, but the cells can't talk to each other until they form neural connections that allow electric impulses to flow between them -- think of telephone lines connecting houses. These telephone wires, or synapses, begin networking in a complex and interesting process, after birth. As this slide shows, the brain of a newborn has relatively few synaptic connections between the neurons.

In the first years of life, up to age three, the brains of children are forming connections furiously. Newborns have relatively few. By one year, they have many more, and by the time they approach the age of three, estimates are that the child's brain has twice the number of connections as the adult brain. Furthermore, their synapses create three times more brain activity. Infants have far more synapses -- more connections -- than they will ever need. Once the brain is fully wired and all the connections are formed, the brain begins to "prune" excess connections, quite literally like a rose bush. Pruning some connections helps strengthen others. This pruning process continues to sculpt an individual's brain until the end of puberty.

So, we have behavioral studies showing incredible learning. We know the brain is wiring itself, and that eventually each brain will reflect the individual. We also have new studies showing a strong correlation between what we measure in our behavioral studies and the activity we can measure in the brain itself.

We can measure activity in the infant brain by looking at the brain waves generated as the baby plays, looks at his mother, or listens to language. This baby is wearing a bonnet with sensors that record brainwaves from the scalp. He's listening to a new language and has no idea that we are recording his brainwaves as he plays and listens. We can see how his brain responds to the new language. Our tests indicate that early in life, the infant brain is very plastic and readily learns new information. This plasticity is remarkable and we believe it will lead to new ways of understanding how children best learn.

New Partnerships

My final point relates to the new partnerships that are forming between researchers, business leaders, educators, and government agencies. When I met the President in 1998 he was still the Governor of Texas. The First Lady of Texas held a conference to talk about some of the issues we are raising today. I spoke to then-Governor Bush about the new research and what was needed to bring this information into the schools -- how we might bridge the gap between the neuron and the chalkboard. I told him that we needed to link research and education -- neuroscientists and developmental scientists had to cooperate with parents and teachers, those on the front lines of education. In order to do that I said we would need support not only from the NIH and NSF, but also from the private sector. Now, all across the nation, private groups are beginning to step forward. It's made an incredible difference, and we are very grateful.

The new partnerships are dedicated to scientific research, but also to disseminating that research. The public needs to know what the science shows about how children learn, and people also need to know what methods don't work, or what science hasn't yet tested. It's as important to explain that "Parentese" helps children learn as it is to say that doing flash card drills with a 6 month old WILL NOT cause them to read any sooner. The goal, in fact, is not to pressure children, but to help all children develop to their potential. Again, the research indicates that normal language interaction -- talking, reading, and playing with kids -- produces the brain changes I described. This kind of learning is entirely natural -- it doesn't require expensive learning aids, just a loving caretaker. The research that underpins this understanding is needed to help direct policy in this area. We need to communicate information from the nation's research laboratories to society.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, with the help of NIH, NSF, and the Talaris Research Institute, we have formed The Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning to make scientific discoveries and to disseminate them to parents, educators, and government agencies. The mission of our center is to conduct world-class research on early learning and the brain. But our goal is not only to make scientific discoveries; we will make sure that the research gets into the hands of parents and educators, and the public at large.

It is an extraordinary time, one in which great advances in the science of learning will take place. Universities, government agencies, the private sector, and the public, are all on the same page at the same time -- a rare event indeed. As represented by the President and First Lady, our leaders have a commitment to education. We think the coming years will be a dynamic and critical time for scientists and practitioners in the field of early learning and the brain. It should be a great decade for all our children.

Background Reading

(1) Scientific articles by Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl show how important learning and early experience is to language development. Four excellent papers on early learning, language, and the brain are:

Kuhl, P. K., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255, 606-608.

Kuhl, P. K., Andruski, J. E., Chistovich, I. A., Chistovich, L. A., Kozhevnikova, E. V., Ryskina, V. L., Stolyarova, E. I., Sundberg, U., & Lacerda, F. (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science, 277, 684-686.

Kuhl, P. K. (2000). A new view of language acquisition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97, 11850-11857.

Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F. M., Liu, H. M., Zhang, Y. & de Boer, B. (2001). Language/Culture/Mind/Brain: Progress at the Margins Between Disciplines. In A. R. Damasio (Ed.). Unity of Knowledge: The Convergence of Natural and Human Science (136-174). New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.

(2) There is a new book published in 2001 that supports the idea that children (from birth to three) are born to learn. It is called, The Scientist in the Crib, by A. Gopnik, A. Meltzoff, and P. Kuhl (Harper-Collins, 2001). The book describes how infants develop knowledge of language, objects, and people. The book discusses children as "little scientists" striving to understand the world around them. It links the scientific research to practice.

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