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.'"

Comments

Babies are amazing machines

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

They can learn nearly any concept from the ground up faster than an adult. Amazingly, they can even do it during the last term of pregnancy, making late-term abortions apalling and John Kerry's stance as a baby killer all the more morally reprehensible. Personally I'm voting to save more of these amazing machines!

Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I'm happy to declare you the No-Shit-Sherlock prize winner for this Slashdot article.

Thanks to you, I realize why both my son and my grandmother dribble, poop their diapers and go gah-gah, but for some reason I couldn't quite fathom, I only booked one of them at preschool...