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How Infants Crack the Speech Code
scupper writes "Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data shows that infants use computational strategies to detect patterns in language, according to UW's Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl in the Nature article "Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code" [PMID: 15496861]
Interesting excerpt from the article: 'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules -- language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'"
I think babies learn everything better than adults. I will stick to my 'brain is still empty' theory :) As we grow, we have more spyware/adware installed, and things tend to go more slowly.
With these new findings, maybe a super computer can be built with these analytical and statistical skills, then this computer can learn to speak like HAL.
nature.com is pretty slow now, given that it's using cgi-taf on a Dynapage.taf, obviously didn't read the Do-Not-Slashdot ACT 1996, so here's a coral link.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
as I understand it, Infants actually learn grammar before they learn words.
It doesn't explain why they pick up swearwords much easier than normal words :)
ga ga goo goo.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Golly, babies can do all this statistical analysis and yet they still poop their pants.
it went like this..
"DA-DA, where's MA-MA?"
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
...how "y'alls's" can be considered a usable word!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Now that we know how infants do it, we can write an AI that can learn to say "Goo goo."
After all, George W Bush is 57, and he's still trying to learn English.
So in other words, if we create a Beowulf cluster of infants, and only allow them to hear sounds from "The Matrix" trilogy, the only words they would be able to say would be, "Keanu Reeves can't act?"
Sounds like a plan to me. [grin]
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
it's easy to see the natural evolution into full-fledged flamewars on /.
Or to simplify the vocabulary a little, "copy what they hear the most of".
Cheers,
Ian
...you can learn a lot just by listening.
But how come adults find it more dificult to do that than babies?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
> infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
They get the NO-CD from SpeechCopyWorld
Did they find a non-functional baby and dump the ROMs?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
But can they run Linux?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
They just use the universal word
waaaaaaahhhhh!!!!
regardless of their native tongue. I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa). The summary doesn't state if perhaps we are teaching language the wrong way. I know that our ability to learn languages decreases as we grow older, but I seriously think there is something lacking in the way languages are presented in high school/college.
The question becomes now, can we take this data and apply it to teaching languages?
Monstar L
OK, my daughter, being the daughter of a couple of geeks, was exposed early on to lots of anime. Now, we speak English in the house, and she certainly picked up on that. But when she babbled, it would have a Japanese kind of sound to it.
She's four years old now and is totally in love with Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, a live action show. Now, her reading isn't up to snuff to actually keep up with the captions, but she loves the pretty girls going shopping, singing, and fighting evil.
And now she takes that same cadence and rhythm from the long exposure to spoken and sung Japanese and will faithfully reproduce the words of songs, or will chatter in a kind of pseudo-Japanese when playing by herself. Yet her English is accentless. Clearly, there's some kind of organizational process going on in that cute little head.
Yeah, we're probably setting her up to get ostrasized in school, but then again, if she'd just pick up on some of those fighting techniques, that might not happen either!
That Bill Gates wrote Windows when he was an infant?
This is a problem. Children, not only in the US but all across the world are using simple statistical analysis to break and decypher our national language. Nearly all of our nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional weapons are created and deployed using this language. We must act.
But what can we as a nation do? We do not need any additional laws, we must only enforce the laws we have. Reverse engineering of this and other national secrets is strictly forbidden by the DMCA. Just because they are minors doesn't mean we can't sue them.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
After reading this I have been underestimting how smart babies are. Makes me wonder where all that intelligence goes after they grow up.
All generalities are dangerous except ones that start with "All
What I need is "How to Crack the Infant Code?" for parents.
Not sure what the hell "la la da ta bwa bwa" means.
John/
1) Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Being born sucks! 2) Ummmm - yummi. More than I exists. Consume. 3) Hey! I could get more if I . . .
Stuff that matters.
someone read it and tell me if it'll help me learn german faster
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Other kids just realize words give them more complete mastery over their parents.
sigs, as if you care.
You're calling them "machines"?
umm...right.
Babies on crack and speed??
New data shows that infants use computational strategies to detect patterns in language...
I used the 'hot wire' method, 'cos Cobol wasn't invented.
The next real question is how children who have learning dificulties in language learn language. I know I have always have the problem dealing with human language but I have always been very good at Compter Language (Ever sience I was in kindergarden) It make me wonder if we can figure out how people with learning dificulties learn language perhaps one method may be a lot easier to program? Although it may not be as good as the average person but it can be good enough to get most programs to understand language. Or perhaps we should see how a Genius in language learns perhaps his method is extramly optimized and may work in computers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Watch a baby for it first year, and listen to it. You will find that babies just start making noise from thier mouths. When the sounds match what the other people say, they do it more, and when they get rewards for making certain sounds they really go with those. You know like when they say MAMA, and everyone in the room goes crazy. It's simple, and well known.
'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories.
No wonder babies are so socially awkward, they're statisticians.
That's pretty much how I remember learning to talk.
Arbitrary sig
Short paper here
More info at sig link.
This way to the egress...
This is nice and all, but I'd be interested in comparing how babies and toddlers learn spoken languages vs. non-spoken ones like American Sign Lanugage or Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You betcha - They manage to get someone else to clean it up don't they! ;)
Stuff that matters.
My son is autistic, and his brain isn't wired for speech the most kids are. I sincerely hope they figure it out so that perhaps they could help him someday.
It's difficult to tell from the abstract whether there is anything new here, but it seems not.
There has been a lot of research showing that children are sensitive to statistical regularities (Saffran and Newport is the basic case) but this seems related to prosody, and prosody is not a good guide to syntax in general. English is slightly exceptional in that prosodic boundaries (e.g. syllables) align with syntactic boundaries (e.g. words) this isn't true in general.
The idea that this sort of information can help you learn syntax, which is the real problem, is profoundly misguided, but unfortunately quite widely held.
This goes along with a few other theories of learning. It's often been suggested that it's much easier to learn a language at an early age than it is when you're older. I remember picking up French back in sixth grade and wanting to take more classes but we moved and they didn't offer a language until high school in my new town. By that point, I took Spanish and yet kept throwing in a French accent, French numbers, French alphabet, etc. Think of how quickly a baby picks up a language as opposed to an older person. It's a world of difference.
My point is, I don't think it's for simply learning a language. A baby is like an incredibly sponge of information. Of course they are...they have nothing else to do but just soak in their surroundings and learn. And learn. And learn some more.
In addition to being a bit more receptive to learning (and having nothing better to do), I think the younger mind also learns at a higher rate because they don't have to UNLEARN so much, or go around all the rules they've been taught for the past decade or two. Just soak it in, and you're done.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I've heard something about infants speaking in reverse.
Anyone with a little child around and willing to try?
look at this page for more detils
Ok so how did I come accross this? Art Bell (late night am talk show wacko) used to have this guest on about reverse speech. The guest would have audio clips played foward, and then backwards. And when played backwards, a quick message would be heard. Supposedly, this message was the subconscious speaking and the truth to the lie would be told when the audio was played backwards.
grump.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I think the intuitive method of learning should work fine. The problem arrives when someone starts teaching you how to learn.
When you get to a place knowing nothing about the language you can get even more than being taught by someone.
Self learning is the best way to learn... unfortunately nobody pays you to learn what you want but what you should.
Well, the article summary sez:
Clear enough?Expose your children to as many languages as you can, in their infancy and beyond. The more languages they hear sounds from, the better.
This effect might explain why my kids have all been a little slow in talking: they are hearing two languages, with very different sets of phonemes at home, and have to decode and make sense of both.
See what I've been reading.
Do they play ogg ?
after a certain age, about 3 - 5 years old as a general rule humans lose they ability to actually hear certain sounds. That is why some native asians can't master the L sound, they never heard it and have lost all ability to hear it.
It is also what make somethign like Russian or Hebrew extremely hard to learn for Americans. Too many sounds we just can't hear/percieve.
There are exceptions of course but that is the general rule.
Could this lead to better language learning courses?
Most of the language courses I've seen do not work well for how I think. They probably work well for how the author thinks, but everyone learns differently. Design a course based around research like this might be beneficial as everyone has already learned their primary language using this method.
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I really think these people are overthinking the whole concept of "cracking the speech code" and whatnot. Infants do two things: React and imitate. They do whatever they can to GET ATTENTION. They cry when they want attention and they get it. When getting attention, the parents will baby talk to the child... and what does the child do? Imitate. The child will continue to imitate until it comprehends words and the results it will get them. ba-ba becomes "bottle" and so forth.
Feels like they're trying to use a 30 page term paper to explain how a blouse button works.
Don't believe it. It takes most humans ~2 years to learn to speak their native tounge enough to call them fluent, and then they still have a limited vocabulary. If you take an adult and put them in an environment that has no one who speaks their native language, and many people who will have infinite patience in teaching their language to you, you will be able to speak it in less than 2 years. The myth that children learn language faster is created because standards are lower, and adults have a lot more to distract them, so the spend less time over an equivelent period, actually trying to learn the language.
Unsaid assumption: babies find it easier than adults to learn language.
It is possible that babies find it really hard to learn language. I don't remember doing it, so I can't tell you. Once we know it, it's possible that we take it for granted. Saying that it becomes harder for adults might just be a part of this assumption, which may be right or it may be wrong.
I do know that adults can learn a new language relatively quickly and easily, if they are immersed in it. If I had my own personal tutor follow me around all day long, and if I spoke to nobody but this tutor, I would learn very quickly and painlessly too. This tutor would speak to me only in the language I'm learning, teaching me as if I were an infant by first teaching me the words for common objects, then simple verbs, and gradually increasing in complexity from there. I'd wager that with a full-time tutor, I could become pretty good at a language within a year, and quite fluent in two to three years. This is comparable to what an infant achieves.
Now, consider that every infant has the benefit of their parents and caregivers, teaching them the language all day long, every day. The notion that babies learn language much easier than adults seems a little less believable to me.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Essentially they figure out what the language sounds like, before they figure out what it means.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
I have a great interest in language (and dialects) and am currently teaching myself Japanese and then Dutch (I pick the easy ones right?) and I've always thought that if I were to just learn their language with materials from grade schools and stuff like that, it would be much easier to learn. Think about it, remember all those dumb little rules about language you learn when you're little? Well, you learn that in grade school, with materials geared for children. The "teach yourself japanese" stuff out there does not address things in as simple a manner, which really is best to do if its a completely alien way of thinking (order of japanese sentences compared to english).
I wonder if one day when they can make "brain software" if they'll be able to translate this concept into software to help us learn native languages.
Perhaps a more practical present use for it would be to create an automatic language deciphering device, much like you would see on Star Trek.
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If you were stranded in a strange place, and you couldn't speak the language and had to rely totally on people you didn't know, and had nothing else to do besides eat and sleep, don't you think you'd be pretty inclined to learn the language?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
...they also crack their parents. Want to hear the most annoying sound in the world? Try a colicky baby at 3 AM (or for this crowd since you are still awake at 3AM, while'll you're trying to play in a CS tournament and know someone is sneaking up on you).
Want to hear to greatest sound in the world? "Dada"
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Especially with how young children can pick up many languages easily... It boggles my mind that they can learn so many so fast. I don't understand how the older you get the worst you get at learning things such as new languages...
:-\
but then again i wish i could learn new languages
All languages combined together form all possible sounds humans can make with their voice. As a baby you only learn those specific subtle sounds your parents/environnement gives to you. Later on it's very hard or even impossible to regain the power to pronounce sounds not found in your native language.
This is why it's funny to hear people speak in (for example) english when they are french. Or our good friend Arnold of course.
Me, living in Belgium and natively speaking dutch, learned to speak french at the age of 10 at school. These are regular public schools. The trick is too learn new/other languages as soon as possible to get the soundings right. (The government is even considering lowering the age to 6 or so...)
Dependency hell? =>
While I'm sure there are many things wrong with the way languages are taught, work on second language acquisition would suggest that it's not just down to that.
The many reason for it being different to learn a different language is that it involves learning a greater or lesser different way of viewing the world. To take a trivial example: I think it's Russian which doesn't distinguish green and blue in its focal colours (ie the ones little kiddies learn first). That's a different way of carving up your experience of the world. Now try learning an ergative and accusative language (like Basque) instead of a nominative-accusative language (most Indo-European languages). There, subjects of intransitive verbs have the same case marking as objects of transitive verbs. It's a different way of thinking. Languages which are more closely related genetically are more likely to be similar and therefore easier to to learn, but even so few people attain native-like fluency.
Second reason is that babies' short attentional spans may aid their learning. Simulations have been done on simple recurrent networks which showed that when the network was trained on whole sentences it couldn't learn word order well. When, however, it was altered such that at first it only got short stretches of speech (as if it had a short memory or attention span) and that then gradually increased, it learned word order very well indeed. Adults may just be too smart to learn other languages like that so the data won't be applicable. (I think Jeff Elaman did this work.)
This movie is very interesting and shocking as well but it really happened. It is about a "wild child" who never learned to speak because it was raised on an isolated room until 13 years old, without any contact with humans, expect her cruel and raper father.
It was based on a book called Genie.
Feral Children, as they call it, is an interesting and well studied topic on psychology.
Perhaps babies learn language faster as they do not attempt to translate it. In other words, babies do not appear to be wonder what "agua" means in their native tongue. I imagine a lot of processing is done by adults who are trying to translate from one language to another real time. I know once you've made the connection with a language you stop performing this step, but in the mean time a lot of energy is wasted in the translation phase.
Mrs. Lovejoy was obviously an agent for the deparment of Homeland Security.
It is said that children who grow up in families with two native languages are better at learning new languages. In the context of this article, I wonder how that works out -- in the sense that I wonder how it makes it easy for these children to learn new languages.
Does the brain develop separate neural nets for each language? Is there a composite neural net? Does it matter how similar sounding or similar in grammar these two languages are? I grew up learning Malayalam (a south indian language from the Dravidian family) and English at the same time. When I was 6, I started learning Hindi. I can speak fluent Malayalam and English and I am decently fluent in Hindi. In highschool, I started learning French and found it easy. Now, I do a lot of latin dancing and I hang around a lot of hispanic people and I've been picking up Spanish. I don't find it all that difficult to learn a language if I put my mind to it.
English and Malayalam are two radically different languages -- in sound and in grammar. I wonder how the neural nets in my brain developed to cope with this, and whether that is what makes it easy for me to pick up new languages.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
That's why we need GW! The Patriots were right!
they remember POLAND.
The article suggests that infants create neural connections that are optimized to the phonemes of the first language(s) they hear. Later in life, when confronted with a slightly (or massively) different set of phonemes from a new language the brain struggles to classify the sounds. This is according to a lecture I heard by an expert on early language acquisition.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Just so nobody accidentially tries these either, they go to some site with a guy whose face is covered in poop.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and gouge my eyes out.
is how Stewie can speak with a Rex Harrison accent and an articulate vocubulary depsite living in Rhode Island with a bunch of people who aren't exactly geniouses......
Monstar L
Further on in development, I believe this would be called a Kindergarden class.
"It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." - Voltaire
Studies show that starting kids late on lanuguage greatly hampers their ability to learn their lanugage. But they also show that starting kids early or late on arithmatic does not have any meaningfull impact in the long run. So somethings are more affected by age than others.
The conclusion: we should be focusing education during the younger years on areas where youth is an advantage. Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college. We should care more about art, music and exploration in younger years, even if it means that math and others are pushed back a few years.
I think that the article does answer this question, when it says "Language experience causes neural changes. One hypothesis, native language neural commitment (NLNC), proposes that language learning produces dedicated neural networks that code the patterns of native-language speech. As these networks develop, they make it easier for new speech elements and patterns to be learned if they are consistent with the existing patterns, but place constraints on the learning of foreign-language patterns. NLNC might explain the closing of the 'sensitive period' for language learning; once a certain amount of learning has occurred, neural commitment interferes with the learning of new languages so they cannot be learned as easily."
I think the "sensitive period" referred to is the period from birth to about age 11. If you learn a second language before about 11, you can learn to speak it like a native. If you learn one AFTER age 11 or so, you will always have an accent when you speak that language.
Syntax and word meanings, which are sort of higher layer protocols, seem to be processed under more conscious control (i.e. more brain software, less neural-net firmware) than phonology, so it's certainly possible for people to learn languages later in life and speak them completely grammatically and fluently, even though they have an accent.
So, in answer to your question, the problem is not the way the subjects are presented in high school (although that may be a problem, too). The problem is simply our biology. Our language facility is programmable up to the critical age, and becomes much less so afterwards. Presumably, learning languages that are similar to ones you alraedy know is easier, because you can reuse some of the circuits you have already built in your brain.
I believe they learn more or less like neural nets. I have a two year old son and quite recently I was doing a project involving ANNs. I could see striking similarities between how he was learning new things and training a neural net. It may also explain why it is difficult for adults to pick up new languages since the whole neural net has to be "retrained" which is a laborious and time consuming process.
That implies to me at least that when our brains our young and more malleable, we start wiring in what sets of noises are allowed to form words. It also seems we're learning grammar to some extent while we're young too.
The categories of languages differ wildly from one another in which sounds can be linked together as well as word order and structure. It seems that once our brains are set to classify a certain set of these noises they don't let new ones in as easily.
I've also been told that when learning new languages, after you learn the third language to proficiency you can pick up more languages without issue. Maybe we just need to learn a new method of learning a language after our first language is burnt into us.
Also interesting is that children who have parents of two different nationalities can generally learn the two languages quite easily if one parent speaks only one language and the other parent the other. The seperation of who is speaking it helps keep the child from mixing the two languages together. I think that observation supports that we initially have a blank slate on which to accumulate what sounds are proper and can form language. Which languages make up the two don't seem to matter, and fluency is much easier for them. There also seem to be fewer problems with things like Engrish when a child is taught both languages properly from the start.
If not now, when?
One interesting thing is that she certainly communicates her needs. For her, crying that is accompanied by head-nods and one foot kicking means "I'm hungry" (and, yes, there's quite a lot of crying with head-nods and foot kicks ;).
What's interesting is that she had that behavior almost as soon as she was born -- and I don't think every kid does the same thing.
Point is that it seems like she was born with a bit of language (mixed verbal + sign) but that it's not the same languge other kids are born with -- I think each has his/her own.
Verbally, she'll now stick out her tongue when I do, but she doesn't seem to even speak "babytalk" yet -- mostly cries and cooes...
It's fun stuff!
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
New data shows that infants use computational strategies
No, computers use biological strategies.
Manager: Damn it, why are the systems down again? Fifth time today!
Support: Well, they crapped themselves again.
la la da ta bwa bwa
Just record it and play it back for them after they learn how to speak.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
If babies don't like being killed, they should form a PAC and lobby against it themselves! Lazy bastards, feeding off of the umbelical cord... They're almost as bad as those slack-jawed hippies!
This is hardly news. Associations between nodes in a network are strengthened by repetetive stimulation. The question doesn't seem to be whether or not people / infants learn by statistical generalization, but what network structures actually facilitate that kind of complex reaction. And yes, everyone _does_ learn the same way, when it comes down to statements as fundamental as this. That's why it's pretty boring.
Now, what do we have to do to get linux to run on one? ...
So you're voting to ban all abortions because 0.05% of them are done in the third trimester? In a large percentage of these they are medically necessary from complications in the pregnancy. There are only a small number of facilities that perform this procedure in this country, so it's not like people have this done out of convenience.
Even if you're just voting to ban third trimester abortions, you're basically voting to kill the mother in situations where the baby would most likely die anyways. How humane.
If we wait a moment the infants will soon have picked up so much language that they can actually tell us how they do it.
How about grammar though. For instance, I work with a lot of Chinese people on a daily basis. Even though they may spell the words correctly, their grammar is just terrible(often to the point that I don't know what they are saying). Is our brain also wired to only accept certain classes of grammars? For example in Chinese verbs aren't really conjugated, (well not conjugated in the same sense as say French verbs) If you want to say did not go, you just use the word for not in front of go. If you say something happened yesterday, you don't need to specify that the verb is past tense(For example I could say: Yesterday I go to the store). This can lead to a lot of very confused English. Is it a case of trying to draw parellels to languages where they don't exist or is it that the way people's brains are wired if they learn Chinese as their native tongue, they have a much harder time processing both English phenomes and grammar.
Monstar L
I think there would be a very high noise to signal ratio after they get hungry.
One child can make a lot of noise (50 dB?) all on his own. I imagine if you have enough of them, they will crack all the windows in the building.
Yes, the difference is that the only language spoken around the kid is the one he learn, the kid depend 100% of that language to eat, take a dump get attention and anything else. The kid is surrounded by a loving family that is talking to him slowly and continuously to help him get new vocabulary.
I guarantee you that if you put yourself in that situation to learn a new language you will learn it much faster.
In Canada we have one thing called summer language immersion programs where French speakers can learn English and English speakers can learn French. If you are an English speaker you go for a month and an half to a French university where you have 5 hours of French classes 5 days a week plus many social activities with other learners. 24h on 24h during the whole program you are forbidden to speak any other language than French, if you cheat and get caught, after your third warning your are expelled.
That's how I learned to speak English. All my English high school classes did not seems to give lots of results but once I got on that program I came back with great confidence in my new language skills. Put me in an immersion program for a year where I can learn Russian and I am sure that I will do well in our formers communist friends language.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
I'd mod you up if I had points, but alas, I will expand on what you said.
I believe that a greater focus on language skills earlier in the educational process will yields better results later on because it will provide a better foundation for learning. In other words, science would be much easier to learn with a greater demand of the language.
As far as being multilingual, who decides what the student's second language should be?
Could you repeat all this whatever again? Slow, please... We are no more infants.
Keep your political opinions to yourself. This is a thread about science, not about pro-life Bush-loving religious fanaticism.
Take your comments somewhere that people actually care.
I'm not too sure about how much thought is put into learning your first language. I would think it would be a natural instinct. When we play catch, we certainly don't sit there and try to calculate rotation of ball, friction, wind resistance, velocity and weight. Sometimes playing catch is just playing catch.
A more in-vogue theory was expressed by Noam Chomsky in the 1970s asserting the existence of a LAD (language acquisition device), a certain type of biological programming that causes children to acquire a language. Notice the word 'acquire,' in opposition to the word 'learn'. Language learning is what you do in middle school, and it's a lot harder; at that point, according to the theory, the language acquisition device has been for the most part deactivated.
This explains quite a few things, such as why certain feral children are absolutely unable to acquire a language and use it the way other neurologically normal human beings do, and why learning a second language is so much more difficult than 'learning' a first (you'll not this is not the same with things like operating systems or other topics of study) -- because the first was not learned. This also explains why, after the first non-native language is learned, language learning becomes progressively easier, as one would expect.
I suggest, for those interested, the following books, in order of preference:
Or, for a more broad view of linguistics as a whole (again in order of preference):
I live in what somepeople may call an inner-city neighborhood. Actually, it is a pretty nice middle class neighborhood but we have a lot of diversity. On our block we have Samolli, Hispanic, Black, White, mixed-race, and Hmong families. All of the kids play together even though some of them are only exposed to their native tounge at home (and some are too young for school).
I frequently hear the kids use a mix of language as they play. One kid may yell in Spanish and get their answer in Hmoung - but they know what each other is saying. Less often (but it still happens) is one of the kids will talk to another kid in "their" language rather than the one they are most familiar with.
As the kids age, it seems that they become a little more entrenched in their home lanuage and English. The Hmoung kids speak English without a trace of accent which really impresses me because their parents don't speak it at all and rely on the kids to be interpeters.
All of the kids really impress me. When I was a child, you would have never seen a neighborhood so integrated. All of the parents make an effort to get along, all of the kids - they just simply get along, they don't even notice the differences!
It's more difficult to learn a foreign language as an adult because our adult brains are wired for understanding our own language, and we tune out foreign languages as noise. Contrast this to a baby, which hears all language as language. Plus, our language's phonemes are ingrained in our brain, and the hardest part of a foreign language to master is the different phonemes. (That's why people have "foreign accents".)
This implies that parents "teach" babies language which they don't. They talk to them, yes, but they don't correct their speech. In fact, studies have been done which show that parents respond more to the truth value of what is said than to its grammaticality. Hence the irony - our kids should grow up scrupulously honest with bad grammar, but instead it's the other way round. Even when parents do correct the grammar of their children, the children are notorious for not paying any attention to the correction.
Second point: so your teacher tells you the names for things. Problem is, when parents say a word, how are the kids supposed to guess what the word refers to. Say baby sees a dog and mum says "Look at the doggy!" and points. Does "doggy" refer to creatures with four legs, with fur, with four legs and fur, with a tail, with long ears, to an animal? You can check with your tutor that you've understood the referent, but babies can't do that. As an adult you have a conceptual understanding of the world. Babies are learning language as they learn how the world works and what's in it, therefore their task is a hell of a lot bigger than yours and a lot harder.
Third point: babies don't get exposed to simplified language from the start, at least not in all cultures. "Motherese" doesn't seem to have any effect on rate of acquisition, which suggests those kids are learning their language just by having people communicate with them in real grown up language. And parents aren't talking to them all day long anyway. Not to mention the fact that kids hear lots of different people talking to them, people with different accents and often slightly different mental grammars. Yet somehow, kids sort this out.
Fourth point: you're highly unlikely to be fluent after two years with a personal tutor. Most adults never acquire native fluency in a language that they only acquire after puberty, and often with a language which they learn during puberty. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that people don't learn what would be their native language if they don't get input until at latest 13.
My 18 month old has a whole portfolio of hand, arm and facial expression to "speak" his mind. It's actually very amazing to watch! And verbal comprehension is fantastic, he has the ability to comprehend what we want him to do without any prior instruction. For example he has never been asked to pick his toys up and put them in his play pen. Nor have we ever used the phrase put your cars in your play pen but to my amazement last we when I asked him to do just that he smile rocked back and forth on his heels and got right to cleaning up his toys.
Now what about reading, do the same thoughts hold true about a child ability to learn to read and when is a good time to start them?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Even infants are busy at work cracking code?
Truly society has is doomed when we are under assault from millions of infant hackers! I say we arrest all infants and charge them with the violation of the DMCA!
Loose morals are to blame for this horrible sequence of events. Vote religious wackos...err, I mean "good, moral people" into power so that we can end the threat of infact hackers by keeping them from the awful corruptors of youth, "knowledge" and "education".
Won't you please think of the children!
factors? in order:
family, school, geography, history.
Forgive the anal-retentive correction...
The sounds of the worlds languages do not represent all sounds which can be articulated but rather those which can reliably be perceived. There are subtly different sounds we can make which can't reliably be perceived. These tend not to make it into segment inventories in the world's languages. Segments which are harder to perceive are also rarer in the world's languages, or are reinforced in some other way within the language to make them more apparent.
I've heard that babies create neural interconnections at a faster rate than at anytime in their lives. I've seen on TV how a damaged brain repairs itself at a faster rate for babies than for older people (actually, they intentionally damaged animal brains and watched the rate of re-connection - fascinating stuff).
Since the brain is a neural network that forms interconnections based on patterns, this may explain why they are able to pick up patterns faster.
I recall hearing something to that effect in my cognitive psychology classes too. IIRC, children seem to almost inately understand certain grammatical concepts such as putting words in the past tense or forming the plural of a word.
Chomsky has/had a theory about children being hard-wired with the basic rules of a universal grammar, and I think this research was examining that theory...
There was a video of a researcher showing young child a stuffed toy called a "wug". The child was shown another wug and was asked how many there were now, and the child indicated that there were two wugs, without being told what the plural for wug was.
Later on in the video, the researcher told the child that the the wug likes to "gling" every day. Today the wug glings. When asked what the wug did yesterday, the child replied that the wug glinged, which is a grammatically correct past test expression of the "word" gling.
The study was conducted with a number of participants, and the results were statistically significant. Admittedly, the subjects were 4-year olds (and not infants), but it is unlikely that children of that age were given formal instructions on the rules of grammar.
I wonder if further studies were able to prove or disprove the hypothesis that children seem hard-wired with certain grammatical rules?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I think babies learn everything better than adults. I will stick to my 'brain is still empty' theory :) As we grow, we have more spyware/adware installed, and things tend to go more slowly.
Keep in mind your brain is still growing when you are a child. Once you hit the late teens, your brain's done growing, and it has to live with just rewiring its existing neurons to adapt to things quickly.
Children, honestly, are far smarter than adults are - it's too bad that our most brilliant years are wasted due to having extremely limited information. It's also important for parents to realize that their kids are far more capable than they think they are - lack of knowledge should never be construed as lack of intelligence. Parents often tell children "you wouldn't understand" when, in truth, the children probably would understand, possibly even better than the parents.
With these new findings, maybe a super computer can be built with these analytical and statistical skills, then this computer can learn to speak like HAL.
I'm really interested in the idea that children classify things via phoneme classification and statistical analysis. This sounds remarkably like a "universal translator" from Star Trek. I think a lot of work should be done in this area - it could be exceptionally useful in understanding the way communication works, and also the ability of computers to understand human speech.
goo goo ba ba ga ga GOO!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Don't believe me try reading ten /.ers comments on any post and tell me if they make sense.
...
They all sounds like goo goo ga ga
I found it interesting and notable that infants are more sensitive to the speech patterns of human interaction than they are to audio-visual representation of it. I think there is an important message for modern parents, here. The TV is a poor babysitter. Get the DVD player out of your minivan and start talking to your baby. I am a single father of an 8-year-old girl, and I've spent her life having conversations with her. We don't have TV reception (how un-American of us), though we do watch movies once or twice a month. I've never used "baby-talk" to relate to her, and she is consistently being praised for her precocious and mature disposition, enunciation, vocabulary, and ability to elucidate her thoughts clearly. I know that there is a separate division of developmental psychology that deals with the application of these research discoveries, so I hope that all of this will be included in practical articles in parenting periodicals and such. Too many children are being crippled by a dearth of human interaction. Otto
It's because chinese is much more positional than English (which is already much more positional than latin languages). In chinese, a word is a word, and though it has a lot of homonyms, it doesn't have any declensions or conjugations to speak of. Heck, it doesn't have gendered pronouns, so if you want to disambiguate, you just stick in another word. Same goes for other words, they get their context from the combination with other words.
It's not that exotic a concept, really, because English also has that sort of orthogonality, just that Chinese takes it to an extreme. Thus, "yesterday i go store" is perfectly acceptable, since "go" obviously took place yesterday, "to" is understood, and what's an article anyway?
I think babies learn everything better than adults. I will stick to my 'brain is still empty' theory :) As we grow, we have more spyware/adware installed, and things tend to go more slowly.
"And how is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"
See if you can make out what this native english speaker is saying on the first listen.
ASF Boo Got Shot ASF
MP3 Boo Got Shot MP3.
I first heard this on the live newscast.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college.
... you can't teach creativity, you either have it or you don't. Unfortunately too much time is wasted in elementary ed as it is on art, music, phys ed ... etc. The primary goal of early education should reading, writing and arithmetic as it was during the turn of the last century.
Unless a language is actively used it will be forgotten by the average person. My grandfather came over on the boat when he was 8 and barely remembers is native tongue
We should care more about art, music and exploration in younger years, even if it means that math and others are pushed back a few years.
*sigh*
0. "......."
1. "boobie?"
2. "boobie!"
3. "mine!
4. "no!"
5. "no! my boobie!"
infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories
I told that to my three-year-old and he just laughed and went to play with his older brother saying "catagees! catagees!"
I think he's mocking me...
-Adam
'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules -- language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'"
So in other words, babies mimic everything they hear until they get the response that they expect from watching the responses that others get from saying the same thing.
Wow, whoddathunkit?
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Hmm, makes me wonder where people with speech dificulties fit in. (I'm thinking more about pronounciation problems, as that's what I had to deal with).
BACKGROUND
I spent from 3-13 years old being taught(in the public schools, yes I have ridden the short bus home a few times(when I was like 4)) how to speak and pronounce certain sounds(English: the R sound(think Elmer Fudd's pronounciation, I sounded like that), SH, CH, and one or two more I think). (Actually it wasn't just that, but also controlling the pitch of my voice because it was high I guess or something (I would have been 2-3 years old, so I don't remember too much and it wasn't done at the schools)). By the time I hit 9-10 years or so it went from learning and practicing to just practicing.
/BACKGROUND
When I was in kindergarden (about 5 years old) the other students could understand me and would "translate" for the teacher, who had a hard time understanding me. When I was at home my sister (about 7 years older then me) understood what I was saying better than my parents.
I think that's true. As I understand it, although we retain neural plasticity throughout our lives, it's much easier to rewire as a baby than an adult.
I've heard the comment quite a few times that learning programming languages, and being a good programmer is inherent in people who can also pick up good spoken languages. When I started to learn German, I started off strongly, making connections to English. Then, I found myself going back to the dictionary, for things I should have been able to remember. Then it hit me one day that I program the same way. When does this functionality in our brain shut down, and are programmers doing anything to keep it running?
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
For more information, read anything by Chomsky.
I wouldn't say that since Noam Chomsky's huge body of work spans so many topics, but nonetheless he is arguably the leading theorist on the subject (not to mention stupifyingly brilliant).
Some specific titles:
* Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use
* Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures
* The Architecture of Language (Chomsky et al.)
* New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Other theoretical traditions would say that there is no innate grammar, but rather that learning a language consists of learning statistical patterns which are represented through neural activation patterns
Which partially describes Kuhl's work, which is the subject of the article. However, I would not go so far as to say that these theories must be mutually exclusive. I subscribe to Chomsky's notion of genetic predisposition toward certain innate language structures, and at the same time I see no contradiction between that theory and Kuhl's description of a possible mechanism for language-learning.
Brain is NOT empty. They know where the wai (Hawaiian means both breast and milk which makes sense if there were no other milk bearing animals) is. They can hang on. Initially with fingers and toes. They have heard a lot before drying off but I don't know if this makes any difference. Controversial subject.
Can they come up with the actual algorithms used so that computers can emulate this and therefore learn speech like an infant? If they can let's hope they keep them away from some of the /. crowd. Last thing we need is a computer that says something like:
I RULEZ! U SUXOR!
Some kids are faster or slower at language but, after watching my two kids and many others in their first three years of life, I don't think the presence of multiple languages has much effect, if any.
I agree that children should be brought up multilingual. But you're unfortunately mentally crippled* if you think language, art, music and exploration are separate from maths.
The level of mathematical knowledge even a small child can absorb and use sets us apart from any other animal. And mathematics and language are intertwined. Mathematics IS a language, probably the most elegant and beautiful there is.
In Ireland, in my day, we were brought up trilingual - English, Irish and Maths. Like most irish children, I was taught diverse mathematical subjects like basic set theory and allowed experiment with map colouring problems etc. in "infants" classes, not just the life-skills of arithmetic operations on the numbers line and how to do compound interest (Shame I wasn't taught basic category theory, which doesn't start out any harder than set theory, but there you go...).
Every time I go abroad, I am thankful that I received a traditional mathematical education in Ireland (and I am simultaneously horrified by the dumbing down of the Irish primary school curriculum to european levels today... gee thanks, EU... but that's another story...)
*probably not your fault, if you're american and have suffered the atrocious american school system that most americans except the ultra-rich have to put up with...
One of the problems in USA is that we tend to push english only. One of the toys that I have found to help defeat the language barriers is Neurosmith's Babbler. Basically, it plays phenomes from several other languages that we lack in English. These are from Spanish, French, and Japanese. It makes a lot of sense.
As to the multiple languages, just ask any coder who knows multiple languages in multiple paradigms. Once you get several languages down esp. with differing paradigms, then it is trivial to pick up more languages. Doing natural languages is no different.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
....is stimulate our cranial stem-cells to produce neurons more rapidly.
Children have a tremendous learning advantage in that they have a great deal more neurons working on the problem than adults do. Sometime around three years old the rate of neurogenesis drops off (not to zero, but to a level where humans perpetually operate with an ongoing net loss).
Imagine having the emotional and intellectual maturity of an adult combined with the tremendous learning aptitude of a child...and being able to produce this state in anyone.
That would make me happy.
did you mean demand or
s/command/demand/
of the language?
All this funding to basically say: "They HAVE no choice but to learn it. And they simply attach frequent patterns with frequent results."
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
Perhaps you would have benefitted from this as I presume you meant 'command' rather than 'demand'.
(PS: Not my translation, so don't shoot the messanger please
sounds to me like they are willingly volating speech protected under the DCMA... they should be punished
cyborgs!!!!!!!
I agree that you can't 'teach' creativity,
but I believe you can 'condition' it.
Being an only child in a rural area with nothing but
G.I. Joes & dirt for entertainment sure as hell builds creativity.
It'd be interesting to see if a baby could learn a constructed language more quickly than a natural language. I'm sure there has to be some sort of study on this -- Esperanto has be out for over a hundred years, so someone has to have grown up speaking it.
It takes a child 5 years to learn how to speak at a 5 year old level, i.e., I don't think you could call a child's pace of learning speech very fast. If a child grew up in an environment where all language was at a complex adult level they would not learn anything. Kids learn to talk because adults speak down to their level, i.e., adults use simple terms and focus on simple concepts. You say "no no no" when they do something wrong, you clap or cheer when they do something right, etc. It is a very slow process. I think if you applied the very same process to adults, they could learn any language just as fast as children. They would also need to think like a child.
Put bags over their heads, too, and make them simulate oral sex with each other. That'll teach them terrorists!
I'm not sure, but there are NLP programs that use this concept to 'learn' language.
Its hard to believe that someone who soils oneself and eats dirt has a better grasp of statistics than myself. Time to bring my infant daughter to my signal processing classes.
Kapla! Long live the Gentoo Empire! Any ko'tal who cannot compile his own apps is a weak piece of baktag.
Right--and using Gentoo, which handles the compilation of applications for you, teaches you how to compile your own apps...how?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
My son turns 4 in a month, and he is in that final zone where the only mistakes are exceptions. During the whole last year we've gotten a chance to realize what an idiotic language it is sometimes (English, that is). I hate correcting him, since his phasing is often perfectly logical.
Too bad real languages can't be reformed (or scrapped & reinvented!) like machine languages can.
If you're gonna throw stuff like THAT into the equation, I can point to my 3.5 year old nephew who calls all chihuahua dogs "kitty", and say that it takes 3.5 years for babies to learn. Really, most language learning comes from pure exposure, not explaination. The US Army spent a year teaching me Russian, and we spent less than 20% of our time having the language mechanics explained to us in English. Most of our time was spent reading and conversing.
Essentially, it does take babies longer to learn language than adults because they have no frame of reference to build from. What's amazing is not their ability to learn a language itself, but the apparent ability to "bootstrap" themselves up from nothing via phonetic analysis. Learning a language isn't so impressive as learning what language is.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
How long is it going to be before we learn how to harness the awesome computational power of the infant mind for the betterment of humanity?
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
From the summary I read, I begin to wonder which languages offer the most flexible base from which to learn new languages?
It seems that native speakers of asian languages either have the hardest time or the easiest time learning new languages... but that's just my limited observation and likely to be highly skewed.
But as a resident of Texas, I am exposed quite frequently to English (Germanic root) and Spanish (Latin root) language variants (think inner city). I don't find it at all difficult to pick up new bits of language whether it's English, Spanish or even of some asian origin such as Mandarin or Korean. Not bragging since I'm not functional in any language except English and that's a subjective measure.
I once heard a Turkish guy suggest to me that he coule probably learn new languages better than me simply because my native language is English and that Turkish offers a much more versatile base for learning languages. You can imagine how insulted I felt when someone suggested they could do something better than me based on something like that. So I wonder if there is a statistical advantage to various languages as a basis for learning others?
> with a greater demand of the language.
^command
Excellent point.
Wow, sounds good. I experienced something similar a few years ago when I had the chance to travel to Germany. Even though I was only in the country for a few weeks, I found that being immersed in a language was a great way to pick it up quickly. I had a pocket english-german dictionary in my small back-pack that I carried everywhere, but I didn't want to look like a tourist[1] and avoided taking it out in public. So I would wonder around town looking at signs, posters, labels, etc trying to make sense of it all. I'd be able to understand some of it, but I would try to remember the words I didn't know. Then a few times a day when I was back at my hotel room, I'd take out my dictionary and look up some of the words I'd seen. Then when I was out in the town again the sign(s) would make more sense. By doing things this way I probably forced my brain to do the work of remembering words and trying to decipher the language, instead of taking the lazy option of instantly looking it up. In this way I gradually learnt little pieces day by day.
Now, three weeks was nowhere near enough time to learn the language. I couldn't hold even a simple conversation in German, and still can't today. But I can see how the immersive experience would greatly help in learning a language.
[1] : In reality, being a blue-eyed blonde Aussie really helped me blend in. When I was with my two asian travelling companions (one was my boss at the time) everyone spoke english to us. But on a few occasions when I was alone I had the locals speaking german to me and I had to blurt out "sprechen sie englisch?" to get them to speak broken english for me.
So who knows the most programming languages here?
I know 99 because I was raised in dual langauge household (Java and ADA)
Would be to have this 'code' and the 'cracking mechanism' abstracted into a framework of teaching new languages to other people.
Can anyone else envision learning basic Russian, Mandarin Chinese or Portugese in less than 2 months? This would be a breakthrough.
Maybe even apply this with sleep learning and we'll be cooking with gas!
I've known many multi-lingual children, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't speed them up. Of course, many is a few dozen, and I don't have any hard data, anyway, but I do think that if it's going to have any affect, it'll be to slow things down.
I'm curious about how you taught your son. My wife speaks only Chinese to the kids, and I speak only English. They learn Mama's language and Baba's language, and when they're little, it really bothers them to speak Mama's language to me, or vise versa.
See what I've been reading.
'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'"
I'm an adult and I don't understand what the fuck they are talking about. I sure as hell wouldn't know how to "analyse statistical distributions of sound" that I hear in ambient language. Whatever the hell that even means.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Pay attention when we point at the car and yell car a lot.
Och. Tha mi duilich. Gabh mo leisgeul. Chan eil me a' tuigsinn agus chan eil fhios agam. Tha mi ag ionnsachadh Beurla. Ciamar a channas tu pàiste anns a' Bheurla?
Pòg mo thon.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Native speakers of languages that have the most number of unique sounds, like Dutch (close to 30), find it easier to learn other languages- their brains are already wired to hear and say the sounds of the new language. Other languages, such as French, have a lower number of unique sounds (something like 23). Thus for the French, it is tougher make the new sounds of another language. English is somewhere like 25, and German around 27.
Ever notice why often the French sound like they're speaking French even when speaking another language? Ever notice how the Dutch sometimes seem to not have an accent when speaking another language? Thus babies who grow up in multi-lingual houses are already set to hear/say more sounds than other local kids.
i think that babies learn more quickly because they don't know how to learn. that might sound backwards but think about it. they do not have a pre-determined stratagy on how to do a task so they are not limited by that strategy. without the patern to follow, they are not bound by it and learn in a creative manner. they learn by discovering and not by memorization. i think that is very important because memorization is quite boring and will allow the mind to drift off, while discovering is quite exhilerating and will keep the attention focused on the subjext matter.
i also think that babies have this 'talent' naturally because of their complete lack of knowledge. Adults can have this ability too, it shows itself when a person is passionate about the subject matter. Adults wont be as good at it as their brains are trained to learn is a specific way and it is hard to overcome that, but it can be done
i personally feel this 'talent' now where i have not in the past. i had no attention span for spanish in high school, it was presented to me in a completely boring way and theirfor, i despised it. i am now 25, and have found language to be very interesting as i love learning about culture and language influences culture so much. also, one can't really understand a culture by reading about it in a foreign language, one must immerse themselves in it. i am now at a conversational level in danish,swedish,norwegian, and french, plus at a low level in spanish and italian. i have learned what i know of non-engligh languages in just 3 years!
i encourage anyone interested in learning a foreign language to read Barry Farber's book "How to Learn Any Language" and pick up some pimsleur courses and magazines for your target language. and travel if you can!!! denmark is beautiful in the spring and france is amazing in the fall, travel is quite cheap for people in most of europe, us, and canada.
I've always wondered - I can conciously tell that my thoughts are in english; but what are the thoughts of someone who doesn't know a language like?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I know I am probably going to get blasted for this comment but what happens when all you use is statistical methods? Does everything look like a number?
In this case, the implied idea behind the article is that the human brain is just a large number cruncher. Is this honestly the case? I think the jury is still out and I wonder if having access to the raw data, I could come up with a different answer than the researchers.
Anyway, that is my two cents. I could be horribly mistaken.
I saw her give a talk last week at the annual Society for Neuroscience convention in San Diego on this. It was cool stuff. She also had a demonstration where a video of a woman saying ga was dubbed with audio of the same woman saying ba. When you just listened to the audio you heard ba, but when you watched the video and listened you heard da, a sound that is inbetween ga and ba. It was a really cool illusion and showed how we integrate both visual and verbal ques into our understanding of speech.
Unless a language is actively used it will be forgotten by the average person. My grandfather came over on the boat when he was 8 and barely remembers is native tongue.
Of course, but someone who has learned more than one language - even if they have forgotten it - has an easier time learning additional languages. Secondly, if everyone in an area knows more than one language, there would be more people to talk to and less cultural bias against speaking a single tongue, so the second languages would get more use. Compare this to you grandfather's case where most people around him spoke English and his parents probably preferred him to speak English as much as possible, so he would have better opportunities then they did.
Alternately, I don't remember a good deal of I learned in Calc II - does that mean that I should never have taken the class? Hell no - it is much easier to give myself a quick refresher on when I need to use it, than to have never taken it at all, or waited to take later in life.
you can't teach creativity, you either have it or you don't.
Well rather than having a philosophical argument about something immeasurable like creativity, let's look at something a bit more concrete. Studies have shown that multi-lingual people, and/or people who studied music as a child do better at math and science, than those who don't. This still holds true after you statistically isolate and remove the effects of external criteria, like wealth and parental involvement. So problem solving and critical thinking skills are not just genetic, but partially influenced by environment as well.
Not everybody that knows a language thinks in it. Most autistics (including myself) think in motions, tones, colors, textures, music, images, combinations of those, or other sensory-based information. My particular type of thought is the spatially-based colors and textures.
My cousin and his wife both speak Spaish fluently. They have always spoken English and Spanish in the home. Their children have had no problems learning both languages. The really amazing part to me is that as the kids pick up on the languages they also pick up the context each language applies to. His kids speak spanish in the home, and with their mother's parents, who are Hispanic, but they never speak spanish to me, or their grandpa (my uncle), and our family. They really know which situations each language is appropriate in.
I swear PowerPoint is going to be the downfall of higher education in western society.
The Oxford English Dictionary Shared Source Programme, OEDSource.
We have invested huge amounts of Intellectual Property developing language as a tool that has greatly enabled the progress of science, literature, engineering and more. It is absurd that there aren't stronger safeguards to protect this investment and ensure that the rightful owners of this work are properly compensated for the benefits spoken language has brought to society.
As a Commonwealth nation with clear links to the United Kingdom, who originally developed English, we plan on vigorously enforcing our IP in this matter. We will give all US citizens a one-off opportunity to acquire English language licences, and thereby protect themselvs against future litigation. Conversational licences will cost $699 USD per node, whilst professional vocabulary and group discussion licences will start at $1399 per node.
Developers of slang or jargon will need to purchase our development tools, as will developers engaged in porting of forgeign language words into our core infrastructure.
We will be subpoena Webster's dictionary, and demonstrate that it contains millions of practically identical entries to the Oxford English Dictionary dictionary that we acquired when we bought our constitution from the United Kingdom.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The correct terms are "Y'all" and "All Y'all"
No, I'm not from texas. I just talk like a redneck.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
maybe it's us tryin to emulate this basic thing, children are faster - even when it comes to coding!!!
As someone who actually read the entire article, I can attest it can really pass a 1.5 hour flight. It *might* also be interesting reading for those interested in some cutting edge child research methods such as ERP electrophysiology for kids. .EDU domains.
What's not clear to me is the value in Slashdot putting up a pointer to an article that can only be read with subscription service that costs an arm and a leg, and is usually only freely available only to lucky folks in the
Finally, let me drop my 2 cents on the original posting that cited the paper as saying about infants: "They also learn phonotactic rules".
This statement is phrased rather loosely. Just because infants' behavior indicates that they can determine whether stimuli correspond or do not correspond to a rule certainly does not mean that the mental representation system that afforded this discrimination actually works by representing anything akin to rules.
You don't need a rule-based system to be able to determine whether a certain input corresponds or doesn't correspond to a set of constraints (see the classical debates between Pinker and McLelland on the acquisition of the past-tense in English).
Saying that infants learn "rules" is therefore a bit misleading.
For what I known, the time a baby takes to start to talk is independant of the time they take to develop language skills.
What I mean is:
1) If you talk to them a lot (as persons not just baby talk), they will understand everything people is talking around them faster and better. Multiples laguages spoken at them will do help them develop this faster.
2) The time when they will start talking is NOT dependant of the time they take to learn and understand the language. It's a physiological thing. Some kids develop all the necessary organs required for talk sooner than the rest, some may never develop them well (and they should require therapy).
into their mouths. Seem to me that would go a LONG way towards compensating.
breasts into their mouths. Seems that would go a long ways toward compensating.
If by language skills you mean increasing your ability to put abstract concepts into words, than I agree. However, if you mean just memorizing meanings of words and grammar, than I think that is only part of the solution.
One issue I have with your statement is that music and math are basically identical with regards to brain function. Coupled with the fact that music and math are the only two areas where children can be adept as adults, delaying math studies could be a mistake.
Almost everything in a basic education grade-school education is important to start early. The only thing I could see worth delaying in favor of an earlier emphasis on other areas would be history and social studies. The danger of omitting those portions is that they are the primary tools with which to teach free thought, debate, and alternative viewpoints. A child raised in even a moderately ideological environment could be too indoctrinated to challenge their own world views if they are an early teenager before they are exposed to studying both sides of an ethical problem.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22i+loved+9%2F11
As far as being multilingual, who decides what the student's second language should be?
Me.
And, in response to your challenging me, I condemn your child to have as a second language Urdu.
Keep your yap shut or it'll be Linear B.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
even though people (especially women) talk complete bollocks to them, and make strange noises.
that really pisses me off - theyre not retarded although you sound like one (woman making funny noises).
what also pisses me off (OT) is when people say awww and stroke their yorkshire terrier [or any other handbag dog] when it barks.
Did the researcher mention anything about sign language and how babies actually can pick up sign language faster than they speak? I find it funny how when people hear language being discussed, they only concern themselves with the audiological aspect of it.
I've seen those deaf sign language users. Their vocabularies and expressions of everyday events is beyond words, for if you're familiar with the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words", they must be speaking volumes that would've put Will Durant to shame.
All kidding aside, why is the visual language (such as sign language) over looked as a primary language in which people learn as opposed to audio? If you think about it, a baby can't even speak properly till they reach the age of 3 or older due to the development of their vocal chords, whereas deaf babies can sign various concepts by the time they're 1 or less.
Mommy, milk, stinky, food, etc. . basic necessities to inform the parents what exactly is wrong.
Don't you ever wonder why babies cry? It's not because they're in pain. It's just simply that they're frustrated that their vocal chords haven't matured enough yet for them to take advantage of it, and the parents keep on babbling to them in nonsensical language, and they can't say anything back.
So thinking about it, you could literally accelerate the growth of a persons language capability by 2 to 3 years by teaching them sign lanaguage from birth and gradually switch to the spoken language.
Ah, just a thought.
Yes, all true, but how can this teach my child how to use a computer earlier? Perhaps with the early phrase: "Computing... goood. going outside the house very very baaaaad."
"analyse the statistical distributions of sounds...use this information to form phonemic categories...also learn phonotactic rules that govern the sequences of phonemes" A baby can do this? I don't even know what it means, much less how to do it, and I haven't been a baby for at least a year or so now (give or take).
*sigh* ... you can't teach creativity
While you can't teach somebody to be "good" you can foster an appreciation and interest in it. Calle me a hippy though, but one way you don't foster creative activity is by forcing all the kids to "color within the lines". I consider myself a proficient painter and I really hated that as a kid.
second language should be?
Second? why limit to 2?
I started with portuguese/spanish, english at 9, french at 11. I learnt italian only by watching tv and speaking, and russian in 6 months.
As someone said, its like computer languages, the more you know, the better you can use the existing "language structure" to learn a new one and be on the look for the subtleties.
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
Here at slashdot we teach our young
another trusty young, propeller-headed, google-loving, virgin fanboy
Do you reproduce asexually or something?
UW is the University of Wisconsin in some of our books....
This is the specific area for my thesis topic in grad school. I can help to answer any questions about the stuff. But, i find this kind of stuff fascinating, dealing with prosody, language learning, and computational models.
Scientist: "There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules - language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words."
Stewie: "And with these newly acquired verbals skills, I can now inform you of the following: I am going to *kill* you!!!"
for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa
This is because English is an idea-based language, with the words representing ideas and other stuff in the abstract. Chinese is more like heiroglyphics(the Egyptian thing), where words and alphabets represent real-world items.
As an example of how these differences manifest themselves, its been shown that dyslexic children who have problems with English(or any other idea-based language) find it relatively easy to learn Chinese(or any other heiroglyphical languages).
Of course, once they have completed studying one language style, the brain gets attuned to this style, thereby nullifying any positive effects studying a different language would have.
stories that link to sites that require non-free registration to read the whole article. I would have liked to have read more than just an abstract and summary on the subject, but it looks like it would cost me $175. (Not that anybody reads the articles anyway).
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
The cool thing about Chinese is that sentence structure is pretty solid. Kind of like a well designed programming language. Anyhoo, in correct Chinese grammar to say, "Yesterday I went to the store." You would say: I Yesterday Go Store.
The structure is like this: . Mostly.
There are some quantifier words that can indicate some sort of tense, but they really don't have an equivalent in English and can be tricky to translate. "Le" is an example. It kind of means, "verb has been done in the past." For example, you could say "Have you eaten?" and I could respond "I eat "le" (wo chi le) which would mean, I have eaten. Or I could say "chi bao le" (bao means round, so I would have said "I have finished eating to my roundness." A Chinese equivalent to "I'm full." Le essentially means an action that is entirely in the past.
Disclaimer: My mother is a speech pathologist (in a nutshell her job is teaching kids to talk who cant for various reasons)
She's come across several (and I myself at my workplace) children who were taught from the get-go spanish and english side by side. (Due to parents reading that teaching a child a second language will make it a genius or some such)
Result? at 2 or 3 years of age the child knows some english, some spanish, neither one as well as would be normal for the age, and cant differentiate between the two languages (ie, speaks in a mixture of both depending on which words come to mind)
I've got no problem with languages, and I do think children should be taught at least one, however from my experiences and reading it seems like one should at least hold off until the kid has a solid grasp on a primary language to start in on a second one.
Could someone well versed in linguistics comment on this? It could be just my location (backwoods, basically) and a string of people who havent implemented teaching 2 languages in a method that would avoid the scenario i described
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I finally understand what Groucho Marx meant when he said: I child of 5 can do it. Get me a child of 5.
I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa).
Mainly it's because the brain becomes hardwired to a particular language over time. There's something like 400 phonemes (phonetic sounds) in all the languages that can exist, but no one language uses them. As a child learns a language, the brain literally configures itself to hear and speak those phonemes that it uses on a regular basis to the exclusion of the ones it doesn't.
For instance, adult Japanese who learn English may often pronounce an R sound when an L sound is intended--the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between the two, so a lifelong speaker of only Japanese has a very difficult time hearing the difference in others or in himself. Grammar is the same way.
The brain isn't so much like a CPU as a PLA, which the environment shapes and optimizes over time to its needs.
Making noises and getting rewarded for it is a very small part of the explanation --- the motivational one. And babies might not require much motivation to speak, either. (Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct that some African tribes basically disdain from speaking to children "until they can hold up their end of the conversation". I forget which tribe.) There are some problems with this view, even when opines (AFAIK, not substantiated) that positive encouragement may accelerate the acquisition of "right" words.
For one, the rate of language acquisition in children is still astonishing. If trial and error were all to go with, they would be expected to make many many more mistakes and take longer to learn to speak than they do.
Factor grammar in, and the number of possible mistakes can become astronomical, and yet children make a fraction of those mistakes. The mistakes they do make would seem to indicate that they are trying to make up rules for the language as they go along ("he wet hisself").
Finally, the "simple, and well known" explanation does not account for the fact that if imitation and reward were the *only* mechanism here, children would never be able to construct an original sentence.
What exactly does it mean to say "not that difficult"? All babies can do it, so it cannot be that difficult to do? Or do you mean that the research quoted is BS because the explanation is so "simple"? If the latter, then I hope I have pointed out that the current wisdom is that there's a lot more complexity in the brain than what Pavlovian stimuli-response "explanations" can explain.
Now that I think about it, the physical act of pronouncing various sounds is probably easier for most people to pick up as children as well, and that probably contributes to the problem at least as much as one's ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish said sounds. I think my teacher understood what "th" sounded like in English - she just physically couldn't produce it (sort of like how my husband, who grew up in a house with German-speaking grandparents, still can't roll his R's).
eg. Fsck fsck fsck! why the fsck did the fscking fscker fscking well do that me right fscking now. FSCK!!!!
Its amazing how versatile one word can be.
I may have to curb my ways before i get a child (or a parrot)
I would like to see pictures of this cute daughter of yours. Preferably pics in which she is wearing a swimsuit or something else that leaves little to the imagination. WAIT, better yet, since she likes Sailor Moon so much, maybe you could dress her up in one of those little Sailor Moon schoolgirl outfits with the tiny skirts that show a TON of leg.
Also, has she started masturbating yet? It's been discovered that children who wait too long to start masturbating often have sexual development problems later in life because they're not in tune with their own sexuality and sense self-pleasure. If your daughter doesn't currently masturbate, you should look into teaching her.
Has given millions to UW for the study of language. I saw a presentation given on the UW channel on Dish network about a year ago by the same researcher, and she mentioned that Gates has a personal interest in this area of science, and often drops by the lab. No doubt that it has something to do with his plans to take over the world. :) Also interesting was the fact that what we "hear" has just as much to do with what we see than what noises are being made.(ie. dub "ga ga" over a video of "ba ba". Even if at the very edge of your vision, you will hear "da da"! Strange but true!)
Yes computing begins early !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Children turn pidgins into creoles. (as summarised here)
The full text of the article (including a PDF link) is here.
I have gone through the two language limit problem, with French and Spanish. Eventually it goes away, or at least it did in my case. In the meantime it is really very annoying and can play merry hell with your vocabulary. The trick is to consciously put yourself into a lot (a lot lot) of situations that trigger the confusion. The immediate result of this is a headache, but eventually it should begin to settle down as your mind develops strategies to switch more quickly.
Handy situations you can try include taking German-language Spanish courses. First thing with this is it will make you feel better about your language competencies, and the second thing is that it will force you to use the two foreign languages back-to-back, to translate between Spanish and German and so on.
Oh, and the other trick is not to stress if you feel like you're losing fluency in the one or the other of them. You aren't, your brain is just in an intermediate stage of rearranging itself to suit requirements.
Having said that, the thing I haven't managed to beat yet is the instant conversational language switch. It's ok between my first language and another (eg. a hybrid french-english or german-english conversation), but between foreign languages it's horrible.
For example, one time in a pub in Luxembourg with a German friend. The barman spoke only French, my friend spoke only German. The danger in that situation is you forget what foreign language is what and start using them in the wrong order. I haven't got any idea how to stop that happening (less beer, possibly...)
if infants can crack language, who not complex mathimatical problems. math is just a different language... it would be pretty interesting if more studies were done on different abstract forms of communication and how infants respond to them.
All the torrents you could want.
In line with your analogies, perhaps we need a "reset" every so often by ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) or perhaps in the future there is a possibility of a complete reinstall. The need of course depends on your gliaCeLLOS genotype come phenotype. I can serve as an illustrative example of the reinstall market need in that even though I use OSX my brain is more like Windows, capable of spectacular feats once in a while but mostly quite erratic, flimsy and unpredictable. And inadvertently ruining my karma yesterday. So mod me up, I have bad karma to spare. I repent.
The computation power of these things has to be enormous! Just imagine the terrorist uses for something like this. Could be used to crack secret government codes and everything. They're not too hard to smuggle somewhere either, and not too expensive in the short term. But the best is that once the batteries run out you can just toss it away and get a cheap replacement. The only relief for the DoHS should be the long time it takes to produce one.
Thank you, I did mean 'command'. But I think a greater focus on proof-reading one's posts would have solved that. :P
Personally, what I find truly fascinating is infants raised in deaf homes. Not only does the child grow up learning sign language as easily as any other language, but the unique grammar influences their thought patterns. Then, there's the bit how children are born being able to speak all the phonemes, but generally lose the ability to produce more than 40 or so. Lastly, children raised with a tonal language such as Vietnamese or Cantonese almost inevitably have perfect pitch. Fascinating stuff.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The variouos languages I learned in childhood seemed to parts of one big language, but using subsets to speak various people. On the other hand adult second languages have a "seperateness" about them.
So many pseudo-informed comments - amazing how geeks think they know everything, even down to linugistics and child psychology.
We should rename the site to "slashtot.org" just for the day, since it's turned into a mother's meeting.
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
^_^ My maternal grandmother used to work as a barmaid. When my mother (second-eldest child) was a baby, my grandmother would often sing songs to amuse and calm my mother. She stopped when she figured my mother was old enough to start picking up the songs. *wry grin* Then, one day, she happened upon my mother absent-mindly crooning "The Barmaid and the Baker's Son" to her dolls...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I'm guessing 4 semesters at the most, with little to no cultural and true language immersion (noticed some people saying emersion, which is the opposite ;P).
I recall times during elementary school, when I began reading more complex novels, learning hundreds of words per book simply from context. Imagine complete immersion in a language for 5 years then being forced to read hundreds of novels from each of which you learn many new words.
Part of the parent's idea might be that our minds have already formulated an approach to bringing words into our vocabulary which can then be applied to newer languages. Thus, if we are completely immersed in a culture and actively trying to learn the language (with help even) an adult will learn the language much more rapidly than a child will over the course of 15 years.
And practical experience proves the point.
The dreaded language switch. It seems like it takes me 15 minutes to fully swtich context into a foreign language. When trying to switch from Russian to German, I struggle to remember words and often get the urge to blurt out the word in Latin. It is so annoying.
Wikipedia article:
Malayalam is the major language of the state of Kerala, in southern India. It is one of the 17 official languages of India, spoken by around 30 million people. A person who speaks Malayalam is called a "Malayalee" and rarely, a "Keralite".
It belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. Both the language and its writing system are closely related to Tamil. Malayalam has a script of its own. Malayalam is the longest language name in English which is a palindrome.
You spend the first 2 years teaching them how to talk, then you spend the next 16 years trying to get them to shut up! :-D
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I'm not sure his (her?) parents understand him (her?) even yet. Unless they are geeks.
I sure do hope that everyone in my generation (born in the eighties and later) have realized that there simply are no "bad" words.
"Bad" words is a relic of religion and misplaced moral thinking, which has no place in the 21 century. I hope that we all will simply tell our children that there are no bad words and that they can say whatever they want. Afterall, the words they will be using is probably words you are using yourself anyways. I cannot understand why many parents think it is okay that they say "bad" words and at the same time think it is absolutely not okay when their kids does the same thing..