Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Children's Language Laboratory at Temple University in

Philadelphia, tells the story of listening to a three-year-old girl speaking to her mother with very
precise adult grammar. Babies hear "the melodies of speech" in their environment and somehow
solve the problem of "mapping sound to language." Hirsh-Pasek describes her experiment in which
she wonders whether the melodies of language really help us break down language into smaller
units. Hirsh-Pasek also said that babies are very likely to hear language patterns while still in the
womb and can distinguish between language classes when they are very young.

Jenny Saffran, professor of psychology at UW Madison, explains how human culture depends on
both language and knowledge of the meaning of words. Saffran describes that word learning is
critical to language acquisition and that babies may be learning language through statistics, which
determines which words often go together.

Ella saffran invented a language with some words that have no meaning and she created a stream
of words in random order, so that babies can determine which sounds and words go together.
Erich Jarvis, a professor at the Rockefeller University Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language, is
trying to understand why babies learn to speak later than they understand speech. Jarvis believes
that the mechanism by which babies learn language is similar to how songbirds learn sounds in
novels. Jarvis uses the analogy of spoken language as "learning to coordinate your body."

The episode ends with clips of three families reading bedtime stories to their babies, as experts
talk about the gift of human language.