[Verse 1] Born with ears that catch each sound from every tongue across the earth Japanese and Hindi clicks, Swahili trills of equal worth But listen close, the story shifts as months unfold and seasons turn The universal gift we hold begins to fade as patterns burn [Chorus] Perceptual narrowing, the window closing tight From universal hearing to our native language sight Statistical learning shapes the boundaries we know Ten months for consonants, six for vowels to go The magnet pulls prototypes near, warping space around Social gates unlock the key to phonological ground [Verse 2] Superior temporal gyrus tracks the frequencies that flow When input peaks divide in two, sharp boundaries start to grow But when the sounds cluster as one, the contrast fades away Distributional learning writes the rules that guide our way [Chorus] Perceptual narrowing, the window closing tight From universal hearing to our native language sight Statistical learning shapes the boundaries we know Ten months for consonants, six for vowels to go The magnet pulls prototypes near, warping space around Social gates unlock the key to phonological ground [Verse 3] Werker and Tees revealed the loss of foreign phoneme ears While Kuhl discovered magnets that reorganize what baby hears The social factor holds the switch - live interaction wins Audio alone cannot unlock where plasticity begins [Verse 4] Mirror neurons fire when mother's mouth begins to move Visual cues and social bonds help neural pathways groove Cross-modal plasticity links what eyes and ears perceive The face-voice connection helps the growing mind achieve Categorical perception builds through months of patient care Where loving interaction sculpts the sounds that linger there [Bridge] Dopamine and acetylcholine supply the gating call Inferior frontal regions map perception to us all From universal listener to specialist refined The neural networks sculpt themselves through social contact signed [Chorus] Perceptual narrowing, the window closing tight From universal hearing to our native language sight Statistical learning shapes the boundaries we know Ten months for consonants, six for vowels to go The magnet pulls prototypes near, warping space around Social gates unlock the key to phonological ground [Outro] Metaplastic tuning shapes cortical design Where frequency distributions draw the native line
← Module 1: Before words. Prenatal and neonatal tuning | Module 3: Statistical learning and the word boundary problem →