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Insights in Human Knowledge, From the Minds of Babies

Noted: More recently, she and her colleagues have begun identifying some of the baseline settings of infant social intelligence. Katherine D. Kinzler, now of the University of Chicago, and Kristin Shutts, now at the University of Wisconsin, have found that infants just a few weeks old show a clear liking for people who use speech patterns the babies have already been exposed to, and that includes the regional accents, twangs, and R?s or lack thereof. A baby from Boston not only gazes longer at somebody speaking English than at somebody speaking French; the baby gazes longest at a person who sounds like Click and Clack of the radio show ?Car Talk.?