PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Speed Dating, Representativeness Heuristic, Pliers
Document Summary
It seems as though as our brain develops, there are time periods where it focuses on learning specific things; for language, 2-5 years old is the critical time to learn. For a infant, it focuses on learning language and how they use their body (6 months-1year old) Young children who immigrate will learn the language faster than their parents. Once someone is beyond the critical period to learn language, it becomes hard to adapt to new language. There is a theory that since humans have language capacity, chimpanzees may have language capacity since they share much of our dna. There have been studies in which researchers tried to raise the chimp like a human and see if they can communicate like humans, which is what project nim is. However, the chimps do not have the vocal apparatus like humans do, and will not be able to speak exactly like humans, instead they learn a form of sign language.
