Research book summary "The Philosophical Baby"

From the introduction to the first chapter the author has explained how we as adults tend to underestimate children and think that they don't understand much or are not as smart as we are.
Alison Gopnik states that "babies attend the world in a different way that we do, and this kind of attention is related to their extraordinary learning abilities" (16). Babies can be very intelligent and perceive the world and what goes on around them as well as we do.
through an intensive study, Gopnik and her colleagues have concluded that children's brains have an immense capacity to think counterfactually, which is basically when we look at different possibilities from a certain situation and ultimately choose the one we consider best. She describes in detail how she conducted such studies with babies to get to this conclusion.
Also, the power there is in children's imagination and how language plays an important role "learning language gives children a whole powerful new way to imagine." (28). She helps you see how language interacts with imagination, and the importance it has in a child's intelectual development "being able to talk about possibilities helps you to imagine them." (29).
Another aspect that caught my attention was that not only psycologists have become more interested about children's minds and behavior; philosophers and even scientists are also intrigued by how much can a baby now and understand and how much can we as adults learn from them, even more than we can imagine.

Research Paper

The book i have chosen is "The Philosophical Baby" by Alison Gopnik. It caught my attention to see that Alison Gopnik is a psychologist, which is in fact what i desire to become, a child psychologist, and this book talks about the minds of infants and young children and how much we as adults can learn from them, appreciate and most importantly, understand them.
Therefore i am pretty sure this book will be of great help, not only as a learning tool for my career,  and of course for the development of this paper, but also in a personal manner for whenever i have the opportunity to become a mother.

                                                                        THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

My native language is Spanish, I was born in Colombia and had never learned another language before until I came to the United States and took ESL classes at la Guardia Community College. Since the beginning I knew it would be a challenge for me to learn English, and I am still in the process, but luckily thanks to my hard work and dedication I have been able to speak more fluently, communicate easily, and attend college.

 I use both languages equally on a daily basis, but, perhaps because of college, I read and write more in English now.

In my opinion I consider language as one of the most precious resources we have as human beings. I don’t really know how does language happen; but it is definitely acquired through family, community and living with people. It would be impossible for a child to learn a language on his/her own. Therefore, two or more people are required to produce any type of language in order for it to happen.

The main questions I have about language, are how it originated, and which was the first language ever spoken. According to many, the origin of language is still a mystery.

After reading Deutscher’s article, I realized how extraordinary languages are, and it made me think of those who have the ability to learn many languages and are able to interpret them and translate them specially when they are completely different from each other.

Another interesting fact from his article is how languages influence the way we think, but the most fascinating one was his explanation about the language of space and “how we describe the orientation of the world around us.” His comparison between the Guugu Yimithirr and how  geographic directions control their speech, while for us it is only used on certain occasions, helped me understand the power of language and depending on its type, how it can determine who we are and how we think.