Zoom!

Yeah, it goes up, up, up, up and away!

[babbling happily]

[Rich] There's the button.

[Amelia] Get ready to press it. Fingers out.

[Rich] Get ready.

Doh!

Doh! Yeah. Excitement.

[woman] Something quite magical happens

at the end of a baby's first year.

-[Pascoe gasps] -[Rich chuckles] Oh!

-Wow, look at this. -Look at this, buddy.

Every one of them embarks on their own journey

toward language.

Can you say "space"?

-Dah! -That's correct.

[Amelia chuckles]

Babies start learning about language before they can walk,

often before they're even crawling.

Is it up in the sky?

It is.

-There it is. Correct. -[Amelia] It's up there.

Allowing them to enter into a world

that would be unattainable without language.

[babbling]

I think that would suit you.

[Amelia] Look at this. Wow!

[man] Human language is sophisticated and complex,

allowing us to have poetry, fiction...

There's lots and lots of people that make it.

So, see all those little bits?

Including the ability to transmit this huge repertoire

from one generation to another, to another, to another, to another,

and what makes human civilization possible.

[Rich hums]

[Rich] Whoa!

Into the space shuttle!

Whoa!

-Watch your head. -This is where we cook space spaghetti.

And then you ask the question,

how do they learn language?

That's the escape hatch.

[imitates an explosion]

So that they, too, can be part of the stream

of human civilization.

[theme music playing]

[toy boings loudly]

[Amelia] Which one?

[toy boings]

This one?

[boinging continues]

[Rich] Boing!

Okay, so his stuff is packed.

[Amelia] I definitely see him watching us make noises

and him trying to grasp what we're asking him to do.

[Rich] Do you want to put your ball in here? In there.

Good boy.

-Ready? -[laughs]

[strains] One, two, three!

[in Scottish accent] Let's go for a drive.

-Should I put the address in? -Nah, it's good. I know where we're going.

[babbling happily]

Bah-dum.

[Amelia] It must be phenomenal what is going on in their brain.

[babbling happily]

[Amelia and Rich imitate Pascoe's babbling]

[Amelia] It blows my mind that you can learn a language

when you don't even know what a language is.

[Rich] You've got lots of things to say.

Okay, arm.

[Amelia] It's pretty crazy that a child's brain can do that.

[Rich] You gonna come out? [strains]

[car horns honking]

[woman] When I was in college, I was headed toward being a musician.

And I guess I was lured by...

things like psychology and the study of language.

[kids squealing and laughing]

[indistinct chatter]

[Kathy] So one day, I'm just sitting at the pool

and seeing these kids at play,

and this little girl comes out of the pool

and she is so upset.

She's about three, I guess her brother's maybe six,

and he has a whole team of folks in there

playing with this big red rubber ball.

[Kathy] And she begins to tell her mom

how upset she is that she wasn't included in the ballgame.

But she did so with the sophisticated grammar

and language skills of an adult,

and I thought, "My gosh."

[water splashing]

[Kathy] I think that we have "ah-ha" moments.

And the ah-ha moment in the pool was to say,

"Wow.

Look at what these kids are doing

so early on with language."

I wanted to understand that.

[car engine revving]

Play with this little fella.

Yeah.

Should we go in there?

What's in there?

How are you doing?

[laughter]

[Amelia] How are you?

Hey, buddy. How's it going?

[Rich] You good? Yeah.

[woman] That's gorgeous.

[Kathy] It's actually taken for granted

that we're going to know how language must work

because we do it every day,

because we're surrounded by it every minute.

[indistinct chatter]

[garbled dialogue]

[Kathy] For the babies,

it's just a flow.

[garbled dialogue]

[garbled dialogue]

[garbled dialogue]

[Kathy] And they don't know any of the words yet.

[garbled dialogue]

[Kathy] Think of what that baby needs to do to crack the system.

They're hearing the melodies of speech

as if it just is ongoing all the time in the environment.

[garbled dialogue]

Hey!

[Kathy] The real question is how they can dig into this flowing sound source,

these ribbons of melodies.

How do they get in there, carve 'em up,

so that they can eventually solve the big problem

of mapping sound to language?

-Ooh! -[Amelia] Ooh!

[babbling]

[Pascoe babbles]

[mewling]

[mewling]

[Amelia] He's getting better at sort of communicating with us.

and we're getting better at understanding what the noises actually mean.

[babbling]

[Amelia] Hello.

[Amelia] The tone, or the way that he says it, sort of says a lot more

than the actual noise that he's making.

"Dada."

"Dada"?

-Dada. -[Rich] Yes.

Who's that?

-Dada. -[Rich] Yes!

Ready?

[crowd applauding]

[Rich] Is Mummy coming?

[crowd cheering]

[Kathy] If you listen carefully, symphonies have embedded melodies

and the same melody keeps cropping up,

and the same thing is true in language.

[ride-goers screaming]

Language has its own kind of sounds.

When we want to ask a question...

[in light tone] ...we go up.

And when we want to make a statement...

[in lower tone] ...you can see that I have a harsher kind of pattern in tone

and then it goes down.

[Kathy] So I wondered whether noticing those melodies

could be one way in which babies

could break into the sound stream

and find the units of language,

the words, the phrases, and the sentences.

[animal chirping]

[Kathy] You know, 40 years ago we were very much out on a limb.

There was nobody, literally no one in the world,

who I could find who was doing music and language together.

No one was touching it.

What should we play with?

-Yeah? -[baby laughs]

[Kathy] So we pulled a team together...

and did an experiment to ask,

"Could these melodies of language, the patterns,

actually be helping us

to break the ribbons of language into smaller units?"

How fun is that?

[Kathy] Finding the nouns and finding the verbs

and finding the prepositional phrases

and finding out where sentences begin and end.

-Hey Hallie, how's it going? -It's going well.

[woman on recording] Cinderella lived in a great, big house,

but it was sort of dark.

[Hallie] Right. So I think we can cut right here,

before the "but."

[Kathy] We had these two samples of speech,

and we put pauses either in natural or non-natural places.

Cinderella lived in a great, big house,

but it was sort of dark,

because she had this mean, mean, mean stepmother.

-Perfect. Great. -Yeah. Yeah.

[Hallie] Let's zoom out a little bit and see if that sounds right.

Cinderella lived in a great, big house,

but it was...

sort of dark,

because she had...

this mean, mean, mean stepmother.

-Oh, wow! -[laughs]

You are a genius.

You have to make sure that you have the same number of pauses

in the non-natural and the natural case.

You have to make sure the pauses are exactly the same length.

[Hallie] You can take a seat and pop Liliana on your lap.

So we are gonna get started.

And then we're going to play those two samples of speech for these babies,

and each one comes out of a different speaker.

[Kathy] The left side was going to have the unnatural.

[device clicking]

And the right side would have the natural.

[woman on recording] Cinderella lived in a great, big house,

but it was sort of dark...

because she had this mean, mean, mean stepmother.

Cinderella lived in a great, big house, but it was...

sort of dark, because she had...

this mean, mean, mean stepmother.

[Kathy] Then the next step is both lights blink,

and then the baby gets to choose, right,

which side he or she wants to look at.

And if the melodies of speech were really giving a clue,

then baby should recognize

the recurrent melodies and motifs,

and look longer at the speaker that had the natural speech.

Cinderella lived in a great, big house,

but it was sort of dark,

because she had this mean, mean, mean stepmother.

The results were really compelling, I think,

even more stunning than we thought they were going to be.

[Kathy] Babies overwhelmingly looked more quickly

to the side that played the natural speech,

and overwhelmingly stayed on the natural speech longer

than they stayed on the non-natural speech.

[Kathy] They're hearing the rhythm, noting where the patterns are,

and they're hearing some of the pitch changes.

[Kathy] Babies, little teeny babies,

are actually using the music of language

to carve out the units of language.

What we found is that, in terms of language learning,

babies were way more sophisticated than we had expected.

[Kathy] The study was very, very well-received

and it did help push our thinking

in the study of language development.

So it was kind of making the bridge

between how you understand sounds of language

and how you would eventually learn the grammar of language.

-[Rich] Oh. -[Amelia] Ow.

Look at that.

-Oh, yes. -[Amelia laughs]

[Rich] I could feel this rump sticking out.

That's for sure.

It'll start to stretch soon and then we'll get the foot kicking out there.

-Yeah. -It just starts to stretch its legs out.

It's definitely a striker. You'll do one goal kicker.

You're liking this.

-You're liking this a lot. -Yeah.

[Kathy] It's very likely that when they're in the womb

they are picking up something about the music of language.

[Rich] Oh, there we go.

[Kathy] Against the backdrop of "bu-bum, bu-bum," for the heart,