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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.
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as I understand it, Infants actually learn grammar before they learn words.
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!
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.
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.
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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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There's a few different opposing views about this early babbling. At such an early age a baby doesn't really have very much muscular control at all (if you've held a newborn, you know what I mean), and this is where the difference of opinion comes about.
One school thinks that the very early babbling and screaches and crying that a baby does actually works out the vocal cords and allows them to experiment with new sounds, learning how to make new sounds and such. You'll also notice that early on, babies tend to make sounds that aren't native to the spoken language around them, such as the uvular fricatives, which don't exist in English.
The other thinks that this very early babbling is attempting to speak, like what you've said.
While I agree with this once the child has learned to use their vocal cords and are actually making attempts to communicate, I believe that the first few bits of babbling and such are most likely the child attempting to gain control over his/her body.
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.
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.
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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!
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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!
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?
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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?
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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*
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'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."
....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.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that we still use thou - we just spell it 'you'. And we still use ye, we just spell it 'the'. (Not to be confused with 'thee'.)
None of this explains the word 'thy', however.
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?
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.
On the other hand, kids pick up a vocabulary of around 50,000 words in the first 15 years. If you do the math, that's nearly 10 words per day.
Ten new words every day.
Back in school, when someone was explicitly trying to teach me words, we had like 10 vocab words per week.
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.
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.
what are the thoughts of someone who doesn't know a language like?
Reminds me about an article I read in SciAm or American Scientist some time ago. Some scientists had performed an experiment with kids at an early age (I can't remember the specific age, around 1 year I think). They had taught the kids a simple ball game. The kids had at that point not learned the proper word for "ball" etc.
A year later the scientists visited again, and asked if the kids could describe the game for them. They found that while the kids had aquired the neccessary vocabulary during that year to fully describe the game, most kids would not use any of the "new" words in their description. Instead they would use only the vocabulary they had at the point they learned the game.
The article concluded that this indicated that memory is formed using the language you know at the time. Which my dad found interesting. He used to teach Norwegian to refugees. In his experience, refugees who only received training in Norwegian and not in their native language tended to lose their native language and if that happened, they also had problems recollecting things that had happened before they arrived.
As for how one thinks without language. I don't think I could convey the feeling of my girlfriends hands running gently down my back to someone who had never expeirenced it, in a way that made him able to truly imagine how it would be like. Yet I have no problems thinking about it. I guess it would be somewhat similar.
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).
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
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Ability to learn a language was found to be independent of childhood trauma. Children exposed to a language before puberty, regardless of abuse and other conditions, were all able to acquire a language, and those not exposed until later in life were not.
Also, language acquisition was found to be independent of ability to learn other skills, such as arithmetic. Language seems to be uniquely affected by a critical period.