Here's a pic from the 28th of December of Grace with her Auntie C____. Please note the lovely smile. She's just started to coo and respond when we talk to her. Grace, that is; C____'s been doing it for ages.
A good tip for getting babies to engage with you that I recently learned, is to use lots of words with repetitive syllables - Mama, Dada, Nana, Baba etc. An initial study using brain scans shows that any word (doesn't have to be family-related like the ones I used previously) ending with repeated syllables will cause the baby's entire brain to light up like a Christmas tree in a way that simply doesn't happen with other words. This seems to me to support Noam Chomsky's notion of inate grammar - the idea that babies are born with the capacity to construct grammar from building blocks. For more on this, I can heartily recommend Steven Fry's latest Podgram, in which he explains the concept with great brevity and clarity, very much unlike wot I would 'ave dun, like.
A good tip for getting babies to engage with you that I recently learned, is to use lots of words with repetitive syllables - Mama, Dada, Nana, Baba etc. An initial study using brain scans shows that any word (doesn't have to be family-related like the ones I used previously) ending with repeated syllables will cause the baby's entire brain to light up like a Christmas tree in a way that simply doesn't happen with other words. This seems to me to support Noam Chomsky's notion of inate grammar - the idea that babies are born with the capacity to construct grammar from building blocks. For more on this, I can heartily recommend Steven Fry's latest Podgram, in which he explains the concept with great brevity and clarity, very much unlike wot I would 'ave dun, like.
