Word: benasich
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...Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., neuroscientist April Benasich fits prelingual babies with caps that read electrical activity in the brain. Benasich then plays one-syllable word bits to them--da and ta sounds, for example--and watches as their brains process the difference. At first, the sounds are separated by 300 milliseconds, very fast but well within the brain's ability. She then speeds things up so that the gap shrinks to 200 milliseconds, then 100, then 35--the point at which the length of the space is less than the length of the syllable itself. Even then the babies...
...kids, however, have the same gifts. Benasich has found that some children fall out of the word-break race at about 70 milliseconds. Find the kids who later develop reading or speech disabilities, and they may also turn out to be the ones who had trouble keeping up with the sounds. "If you can't make a precise phonological map of a word," Benasich says, "you can't recognize it or reproduce it." If therapists could spot kids with such processing problems early, they could provide programs better targeted to their needs. No matter how the children's disability...
...sounds and file them away in phonic bins. If language-impaired children never perceive ba and da as different, then they may form mental magnets that file these sounds into the same broad category, seriously undermining their ability to group sounds into words and sentences later on. Indeed, believes Benasich, the ability to make fine acoustic distinctions is one of the pilings on which language is built. "If the pilings are rickety," she says, "then language is not going to develop as well...
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