(NPR) “When you trace it all back, really the fundamental thing that grows human brains in the first three years of life is parent talk and interaction. And there is no way around it,” says Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago Hospital and the founder of the Thirty Million Words Initiative. “The brain is hard-wired to learn from human language and interaction.”
Suskind conducted close to 200 surgeries to install cochlear implants in the ears of children, to help them hear. Over the years, she came to see first-hand, in the operating room and X-rays, that hearing words vitalizes the brains of infants.
“The language comes in: You get these neural connections building the sort of architecture of the brain. It’s really the foundation for all thinking and learning,” she says. “I always say that language is the nutrition for the developing brain.” Read More
Author: NPR Staff
Publish Date: 12.5.2015