Inside the Minds of Babies
01 November 2011
Nurses hold newborn babies in Sidon, Lebanon, on Monday, the day the United Nations Population Fund estimated that the world reached 7 billion people
JUNE SIMMS: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. I’m June Simms.
MARIO RITTER: And I’m Mario Ritter. This week, we examine scientific findings about how intelligence develops in babies.
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JUNE SIMMS: Not long ago, many people believed that babies only wanted food and to be kept warm and dry. Some people thought babies were not able to learn things until they were five or six months old.
Yet doctors in the United States say babies begin learning on their first day of life. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is a federal government agency. Its goal is to identify which experiences can influence healthy development in people.
Researchers at the institute note that babies are strongly influenced by their environment. They say a baby will smile if her mother does something the baby likes. A baby learns to get the best care possible by smiling to please her mother or other caregiver. This is how babies learn to connect and communicate with other people.
The researchers say this ability to learn exists in a baby even before birth. They say newborn babies can recognize and understand sounds they heard while they were still developing inside their mothers.
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