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How Infants Crack the Speech Code

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the some-of-us-never-quite-crack-it dept.

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.'"

10 of 506 comments (clear)

  1. grammar by AssProphet · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  2. Confirms a suspicion I've had all along by YetAnotherName · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Confirms a suspicion I've had all along by La+Camiseta · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  3. Feral Children by gustgr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. How about children with two native languages? by vivin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:How about children with two native languages? by hazem · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:How about children with two native languages? by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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!)
      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    3. Re:How about children with two native languages? by MidnightBrewer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
    4. Re:How about children with two native languages? by WhiteDeath · · Score: 5, Interesting


      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.

  5. In my neighborhood by gone.fishing · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!