Cowplanet

A few weeks ago, we received a letter from the “Laboratoire des Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistiques” asking if we would let our baby participate in a study about language acquisition. They were looking for babies between 4½ and 5½ months.
Last Saturday morning we entered a cramped room on the basement level of my maternity hospital where a post-graduate research student welcomed us and explained the experiment. A few minutes later, my little girl and I sat in a soundproof room, looking at a screen. My baby was being filmed, I was wearing soundproof headphones so that my reaction to the sounds she would hear would not influence her.
Then we watched in turns cartoon scenes and an unmoving circle on the screen, while two syllables were being played. I didn’t watch for her reaction, but Daddy who was seeing the camera image, later told me she’d followed the cartoons but got quickly bored whenever the circle came to the screen. This, the researcher had told us, was intentional, measuring her interest.
The whole experiment lasted eight minutes, and if our baby had started crying, it would have been stopped at once. But I’m proud to say she was extremely cooperative. (Hey, she got to watch cartoons!)
We will receive more information about the study when it is finished. I am very much looking forward to it.
Did you know that at five months, a baby already knows that one plus one equals two? I didn’t.

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