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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.'"

4 of 506 comments (clear)

  1. wow... by JustNiz · · Score: 0, Redundant

    > infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...

  2. Babies don't have to crack the code by cyber_rigger · · Score: 0, Redundant

    They just use the universal word

    waaaaaaahhhhh!!!!

  3. In other words... by shatfield · · Score: 0, Redundant

    '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
  4. You're not the first to notice... by solferino · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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.