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

I think babies learn everything better than adults

[fembots]

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.

grammar

[AssProphet]

as I understand it, Infants actually learn grammar before they learn words.

Confirms a suspicion I've had all along

[YetAnotherName]

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!

Re:Confirms a suspicion I've had all along

[La Camiseta]

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.

This is actually a regular occurence with children who learn multiple languages before puberty. Typically, when you learn two or more languages before you reach puberty, you are able to speak both without a discernable accent.

If you were to take your daughter to Japanese classes at this age, odds are that she would grow up able to speak Japanese without an English accent and vice-versa.

Good, but what about sign language?

[davidwr]

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.

Feral Children

[gustgr]

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.

How about children with two native languages?

[vivin]

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.

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[hazem]

I can't cite any studies, but my friend, who is a special-ed teacher, says that research indicates that children growing up dual-language house-holds learn both languages very well. But they also tend to develop slower in either language. So, in your case, you learned Malayalam and English to full fluency. But compared to other children only learning English or Malayalam, they learned their one langauge faster. So strangely, you seem, by some measures, developmentally impaired.

Of course, once you finally catch up, you now have a much easier ability to learn new languages.

This all pretty makes sense to me. You're learning two languages, not one, so of course it takes longer. What I wonder, though, is what might you be be giving up to have gained the ability to quickly master languages?

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[Ford Prefect]

Since we use a small fraction of our brain (the amount various depending on what source you ask, some say less than 10 some say less than 30, I say less than 10 is less than 30 but 10 is probably only counting conscious usage, 30 is probably counting all brain activity), it may only cause you to use some of it that isn't normally used at all, while the rest of us go without.

Huge urban myth - humans use all of their brains, and if they didn't, natural selection would have disposed of us pretty quickly.

Brain tissue is incredibly expensive from an energy point of view, and it's only because we make very good use of it* that it gave us such an evolutionary advantage. It is highly adaptable, though, and in certain cases it's possible to make a partial recovery from severe brain injury, effectively through reassigning some of it to a new task.

Google found me an interesting article with figures and stuff, if anyone wants to read it. :-)

(* Some politicians excepted, of course!)

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[MidnightBrewer]

I started studying German at the age of 16 through immersion, and after going back for another year, getting a college degree and continuing to speak it for 12+ years, I am a native speaker in the language (right down to dialect.) I have now been living in Japan for the last two years, and I have noticed several interesting things while I've been learning Japanese:

1. My brain doesn't distinguish between German and Japanese, it merely rates them as "not English." For example, watching a Japanese program teaching German, I find that when they jump from German to Japanese, it takes a second for my brain to register, "Oh, wait, comprehension just dropped from 100% to 30%."

When you're speaking a language, the best technique involves ignoring that it's a foreign language at all (yeah, it's a Zen thing.) Think of it like a computer: running natively always works better than emulation. Therefore, there's no flag that pops up saying, "They are now speaking German," etc. You either can understand it or you can't.

2. I find that Japanese is easy to master from a phonetic and mannerism standpoint, because I already overcame the mental hurdles once with German. It's easier to divorce myself from my original language and cultural frame of reference in order to allow me to accept the differences of Japanese language and culture at face value, rather than digging my heels in and saying, "This is strange, this is weird, this is hard."

3. There definitely is a phonotactic structure to every language that one learns. (I recently figured this out; good to know there's a name for it.) Basically, I can see a word and say, "That can't be a Japanese word," or "That can't be German," just like I can do in my own native English. This particular knack doesn't even require that high a level of mastery of grammar or vocabulary; it seems to work on a sub-conscious level as the brain accumulates experience and cross-references it against everything else you've learned so far.

Basically, take a page out of the baby's book. I think it's definitely the blank canvas and the lack of conditioned structure that allows them to adapt so flexibly to learning language. Even as adults, if we can allow ourselves to relax and accept a foreign language without mentally pausing every other word to register that it's foreign, mastering a new one isn't as bad as you think.

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[WhiteDeath]

Unfortunately the hard drive does not usually contain a file system that can self-repair. For example, if your FAT/FAT32 disk loses data in its index, you lose your data (unless you are very skilled with a disk editor). I've never had to try it with NTFS, but both HPFS (the OS/2 file system) and Ext2/Ext3 can completely re-build themselves (with the aid of fsck) when corrupted - I have seen this first hand on both. Chances are you will lose SOME data, but never ALL data.

Some time ago, my father had a minor stroke during the night, and woke up not remembering the last 10 years. It took us a while to work out what happened, and it was quite frustrating to be talking to him to try and work out what he remembered, then finding he had had a "reset" and forgotten the last half hour completely. We did notice that each reset brought back a large chunk of memory.

By lunch time his brain had finished running fsck, and he had all his memory up to and including the night before (but no memory of that morning).

He had various scans etc to confirm the stroke, but they really just confirmed what happened.

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[tooth]

I find it interesting that morse is basically just another language, esp when it gets up to high speed.

There are stories of people being able to undestand it without actively listening to it, and I once read about a ham that was listening to morse and as the sender increased speed, the ham thought to himself "when did he switch to voice?"

The real high speed receivers recognise whole words and sentences in morse as the letters are too fast to hear individually, the same way we hear words and not just sylables.

I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old

[turnstyle]

I just became a pop for the first time 2 months ago, so I've been paying attention to this sort of stuff.

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!

In my neighborhood

[gone.fishing]

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!

They learn to get the point across FAST

[JohnnyGTO]

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?

Inate Universal Grammar

[why-is-it]

as I understand it, Infants actually learn grammar before they learn words.

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?

Re:The article states that babies learn the same w

[Student_Tech]

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.

Re:What language do babies think in?

[Lord Crc]

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.

How Students Crack Nature Reviews Neuroscience

[Oori]

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.
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 .EDU domains.

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.