Good morning.
Wednesday will be an increasingly cloudy day in Whitewater, with a high of about twenty-three; in Denver, it will be breezy and fifty.
On this day in 1912, “English explorer Robert F. Scott and his expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had gotten there first.”
Most babies, it seems, have a natural facility for lip-reading:
“Babies start to lip-read when they learn to babble,” [psychologist David] Lewkowicz says. “At that time, infants respond to what they see and hear as a unified stimulus.”
….Lewkowicz and Hansen-Tift tested 179 infants from English-speaking families at age 4, 6, 8 or 12 months. Special devices tracked where babies looked when shown videos of women speaking English or a foreign language — in this case, Spanish.
From age 8 months to 1 year, babbling babies read the lips of both English and Spanish speakers, the researchers say. Nascent talkers shifted to looking mainly at the eyes of an English-speaker, but continued to home in on the mouth of a woman speaking the unfamiliar language of Spanish. Increasing familiarity with a native language narrows a youngster’s ability to perceive novel speech sounds, necessitating continued lip-reading of foreign-language speakers, the researchers say….
Google’s puzzle of the day is geographical, arithmetical: “If Sri Lanka were a member of the United States, where would it rank in terms of size?”