Children Are Born to Learn

Learning in the Early Years | 47

This chapter begins by reviewing research on children’s prodigious learning capacities. Next, it focuses on five areas of core knowledge in which young children learn rapidly and spontaneously, developing a foundation for later learning in school: (1) places, (2) numbers, (3) objects, (4) people’s actions and goals, and (5) social relationships, communication, and language. After introducing these core areas of knowledge, the chapter turns to evidence concerning the more general cognitive skills and predispositions that support children’s learning across diverse content areas, including executive functions that regulate attention and action planning, imagination, their capacity for metacognition, and their motivation to learn. Finally, the chapter considers factors that promote and hinder young children’s learning and highlights important questions for further research.

From birth, children perceive their environment and start to learn about it, especially by looking and listening. Like animals that must move from birth and avoid predators, newborn infants perceive depth, movement, and objects. Like animals that must learn critical features of their environment from birth—for example, the location of their nest (Gallistel 1990), the approximate size of their social group (Rugani, Regolin, and Vallortigara 2010), and the appearance and behavior of their family members (Sugita 2008) and of objects (Chiandetti and Vallortigara 2011; Wood 2013)— newborn infants perceive the extended surface layout (Slater, Mattock, and Brown 1990), the approximate number of objects in an array (Izard et al. 2009), faces (Mondloch et al. 1999), patterns of biological motion (Simion Regolin, and Bulf 2008), and vocalizations (Vouloumanos and Werker 2007). Infants not only perceive objects, places, and people from birth but also begin learning about these entities. In some cases, learning even starts before birth, as evidenced by the ability of newborn infants to detect, orient to, and identify the sounds of their native language when they first hear them outside the womb (Mehler et al. 1988), sounds that their auditory system has detected over the last months of gestation. But learning accelerates after birth as infants become immersed in the natural and social world. In the first few months of life, infants begin to distinguish human faces from those of other species (Di Giorgio et al. 2012; Heron-Delaney, Wirth, and Pascalis 2011) and to recognize their caregivers (Burnham 1993; Pascalis et al. 1995). Well before they begin to speak, infants learn to distinguish the vowels and consonants of their native language from those of foreign languages (Kuhl 2004; Werker 1989), to parse the speech stream into words (Saffran, Aslin, and Newport 1996), to discover the structure of phrases (Shi, Werker, and Cutler 2006), and to connect the most frequent