![]() ![]() The assistant puts away the duck and brings out a white lamb doll and the same accessories, then she gives Lena a go. She performs a set of actions, including taking off the hat and putting it back, and taking a pair of mittens out of a pocket, shaking them and putting them back. In the first task, the research assistant shows Lena a soft yellow duck puppet wearing a black hat. ![]() This is a place to play and be themselves." ![]() "We try to have an environment where they feel free to move around and feel comfortable, and they can understand that this is a safe environment. "Kids get scared easily," Arredondo says. Areas of the brain that are engaged, for example when listening to speech, use more oxygen.Īfter several years of training and hundreds of infants and children participating in her studies, Arredondo has learned how to put children at ease. It's part of a technique called fNIRS, functional near infrared spectroscopy, that measures the level of oxygenation in different areas of the brain. The cap on her head uses infrared light to safely map brain activity in real time. Lena lives in a household where only one language, English, is predominantly spoken. Experiments designed to test this idea have had mixed results.Īrredondo has three short tasks planned for Lena today designed to test some of the fundamental skills related to learning. If true, perhaps bilingual children are better at learning all kinds of things. There's a hotly debated hypothesis in this field that bilingual children are better at higher cognitive functions that are critical for learning-such as memory, inhibitory control and attention-compared to monolingual children. She's interested in how children learn multiple languages, but also in how the underlying skills needed to learn them bleeds over into other kinds of learning. And so I wondered: why do some people struggle and some people seem to find it very easy?" "But my younger brother had a really easy time. "I found it very interesting how my parents and older sister struggled to learn a new language," she says. She first learned English when she moved from Argentina to the U.S. The focus of her research grew out of a very personal curiosity. "And as you saw, the samples for that paper are quite small, less than a hundred, because it's not just about the brain activity, but it's also about compliance from the baby."Īrredondo, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences who runs the Child Learning and Development Studies Lab at The University of Texas at Austin, is trying to understand how growing up in a bilingual environment affects a child's learning. "I tested 300 babies during my postdoctoral studies," Arredondo says. ![]() Maria Arredondo sneaks up and slips on the cap. The assistant tries a distraction: she waves a plastic wand with a ball on the end that blinks different colors. A round of "Baby shark"-and a snack from mom-helped calm her a little. Two-year-old Lena has already refused twice to wear the strange stretchy cap with a chin strap and bundle of wires tethered to a computer. A scientist and her research assistant, neither of whom the child has met before, hover around her in a smallish room with a desk, some electronic equipment and a flat-screen TV. She's sitting on her mother's lap and her mother is talking to her in that gentle mother voice that says, despite all appearances, this is normal, you are safe and there will probably be a nice treat for you for cooperating. There's a cute little curly headed cherub in a yellow dress, and she is the star of the show. ![]()
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