Netflix’s Babies: First Words – Tuning the Ear and Training the Tongue
I think everyone who works in the field of teaching a foreign language is familiar with the silent period hypothesis introduced by Krashen (1982). Recently, I watched a Netflix documentary that provided an interesting ideas that might help explain why this silent period occurs. One of the key ideas presented was that “the speech circuit of humans is a motor circuit, a set of neurons in the brain that then co ntrol muscles, and that's what’s controlling your speech” (Netflix, 2020, 42:15–42:25). This means learning to speak is comparable to training a muscle or developing a new kind of movement – it requires practice and neurological adaptation. The documentary also explored how children manage to recognize and distinguish individual words, especially since adults speak in connected speech where words flow seamlessly together. One researcher – Jenny Saffran – suggested that children’s brains operate on a statistical level, detecting how frequently different combinations of soun...
