Reconstructing Our Perception of Documentary: A Response to Caouette’s Tarnation

    Learning about and from Babies

What do babies know and how do they learn:

We are accustomed to hearing the benefits of multilingualism being extolled, and the advent of rapid globalization throws into even sharper relief the foolhardiness of confining oneself to the “prison house” of the mother tongue. In “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” Guy Deutscher discusses recent attempts to reinvestigate the architecture of this prison. The investigation follows decades of polite avoidance of the subject as new studies, Deutscher says, are providing linguists with ways of thinking about the relationship between primary language and cognition that are far more sophisticated than Benjamin Lee Whorf’s now much-derided claim that Native American languages, for example, “impose on th