critical period hypothesis

Cracking the Code Before Words: The Infant’s Amazing Ability to Find Word Boundaries

6 min read

To an infant, spoken language is a continuous, unbroken river of sound. So how do they learn where one word ends and the next begins? This amazing feat of “speech segmentation” happens long before they understand meaning, as babies act like tiny statisticians, tracking syllable patterns and listening for the rhythmic cues of their native language to crack the code.

History Psychology Linguistics Psycholinguistics

The Girl Who Couldn’t Speak: Genie and the Tragic Limits of the Critical Period for Language

6 min read

The tragic case of “Genie,” a feral child discovered in 1970 after a decade of silent isolation, offers a harrowing look into the “critical period” for language acquisition. While she could learn a vast vocabulary after being rescued, her inability to grasp grammar provided powerful, heartbreaking evidence that the window for learning the fundamental rules of language may be biologically timed. Her story explores the intricate and fragile relationship between our environment, our biology, and the very words we use to define our world.