How Infants Crack the Speech Code

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 1, 2004 @08:47AM 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.'"

1 of 506 comments (clear)

Re:Analyse ambient sounds? by Oligonicella · 2004-11-01 09:57 · Score: 0, Troll

Hear, hear. Pun intended. The overblown phrases sure sound like someone padding the writing so they don't sound like they're explaing the common-sense things we all observe as an infant grows.

I could have used a grant when I was raising my daughter.