TED-Talk: Creating bilingual minds

Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez is a professor at the University of Washington where she studies the processing of language in infants and young children. In her talk, she speaks about how the brains of bilingual babies develop compared to monolingual babies. For instance, she shows how monolingual and bilingual babies as young as 11 months already process sounds that belong to Spanish and/or English differently dependent on whether they have been hearing that language growing up or not. Additionally, Dr. Ferjan Ramirez touches upon general phenomena and principles of bilingualism such as codeswitching. Overall, it’s a nice follow up talk to the widely watched 2012 TED Talk by Dr. Patricia Kuhl “The linguistic genius of babies.”