Q: Linguistically speaking, who are the true "citizens of the
world"? J. Piaget A: They are newborns, whose ears take in the
sounds of life, including the phonemic building blocks of
English, Spanish, Estonian, Zulu. You name it, they're all
there, hundreds of distinct sounds of all the world's tongues
(about 40 in English). But before long they won't be heard, just
as somewhere between six and 12 months Japanese infants stop
distinguishing between English "r" and "l." Even before speech
begins, an infant's brain is being "sculpted" by talk, the pre-
wired neural machinery pruning itself until what isn't
reinforced by words heard or lips read starts to fade, as shown
by brain wave monitorings and linguistic responses, says Richard
Restak, M.D., in The Secret Life of the Brain. Cross-cultural
generalists at the get-go, their minds multidextrous, infants
"by the time they reach one year of age become language
specialists," said University of Washington speech and hearing
scientist Patricia Kuhl. "Babies born in