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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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
as I understand it, Infants actually learn grammar before they learn words.
It doesn't explain why they pick up swearwords much easier than normal words :)
ga ga goo goo.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
After all, George W Bush is 57, and he's still trying to learn English.
So in other words, if we create a Beowulf cluster of infants, and only allow them to hear sounds from "The Matrix" trilogy, the only words they would be able to say would be, "Keanu Reeves can't act?"
Sounds like a plan to me. [grin]
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Or to simplify the vocabulary a little, "copy what they hear the most of".
Cheers,
Ian
regardless of their native tongue. I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa). The summary doesn't state if perhaps we are teaching language the wrong way. I know that our ability to learn languages decreases as we grow older, but I seriously think there is something lacking in the way languages are presented in high school/college.
The question becomes now, can we take this data and apply it to teaching languages?
Monstar L
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!
This is a problem. Children, not only in the US but all across the world are using simple statistical analysis to break and decypher our national language. Nearly all of our nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional weapons are created and deployed using this language. We must act.
But what can we as a nation do? We do not need any additional laws, we must only enforce the laws we have. Reverse engineering of this and other national secrets is strictly forbidden by the DMCA. Just because they are minors doesn't mean we can't sue them.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Watch a baby for it first year, and listen to it. You will find that babies just start making noise from thier mouths. When the sounds match what the other people say, they do it more, and when they get rewards for making certain sounds they really go with those. You know like when they say MAMA, and everyone in the room goes crazy. It's simple, and well known.
'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.
No wonder babies are so socially awkward, they're statisticians.
That's pretty much how I remember learning to talk.
Arbitrary sig
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, the article summary sez:
Clear enough?Expose your children to as many languages as you can, in their infancy and beyond. The more languages they hear sounds from, the better.
This effect might explain why my kids have all been a little slow in talking: they are hearing two languages, with very different sets of phonemes at home, and have to decode and make sense of both.
See what I've been reading.
nope. They took a functional baby and analyzed its core dump :-)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Don't believe it. It takes most humans ~2 years to learn to speak their native tounge enough to call them fluent, and then they still have a limited vocabulary. If you take an adult and put them in an environment that has no one who speaks their native language, and many people who will have infinite patience in teaching their language to you, you will be able to speak it in less than 2 years. The myth that children learn language faster is created because standards are lower, and adults have a lot more to distract them, so the spend less time over an equivelent period, actually trying to learn the language.
It wouldn't be a "problem" if current English had a more formal way of differentiating 2nd-person singular from 2nd-person plural. We use "you all" or "you guys" because we don't use "thou" and "ye" anymore.
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.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
is how Stewie can speak with a Rex Harrison accent and an articulate vocubulary depsite living in Rhode Island with a bunch of people who aren't exactly geniouses......
Monstar L
Studies show that starting kids late on lanuguage greatly hampers their ability to learn their lanugage. But they also show that starting kids early or late on arithmatic does not have any meaningfull impact in the long run. So somethings are more affected by age than others.
The conclusion: we should be focusing education during the younger years on areas where youth is an advantage. Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college. 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.
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!
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
The critical period theory, that a child can only acquire a first language until the beginning of puberty, has been confirmed in many case studies. For obvious ethical reasons, these experiments cannot be set up intentionally, but in cases such as a severely abused child who was never exposed to language until about age 10, a woman who was deaf until a surgery when she was 30, the peopl e who have not yet reached puberty are still able to learn a language normally, and the rest are not. I strongly recommend reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker if you are interested. Pinker also discusses differences between learning a language and learning other things. For example, in most other things children learn, they see exactly what is done and then mimic it. However, learning language also gives a child the ability to create a sentence he has never heard before. Additionally, language is learned with no formal instruction, whereas other skills must be taught actively.
I'd mod you up if I had points, but alas, I will expand on what you said.
I believe that a greater focus on language skills earlier in the educational process will yields better results later on because it will provide a better foundation for learning. In other words, science would be much easier to learn with a greater demand of the language.
As far as being multilingual, who decides what the student's second language should be?
Speak for thouself...
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?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
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?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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.
Keep in mind your brain is still growing when you are a child. Once you hit the late teens, your brain's done growing, and it has to live with just rewiring its existing neurons to adapt to things quickly.
Children, honestly, are far smarter than adults are - it's too bad that our most brilliant years are wasted due to having extremely limited information. It's also important for parents to realize that their kids are far more capable than they think they are - lack of knowledge should never be construed as lack of intelligence. Parents often tell children "you wouldn't understand" when, in truth, the children probably would understand, possibly even better than the parents.
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.
I'm really interested in the idea that children classify things via phoneme classification and statistical analysis. This sounds remarkably like a "universal translator" from Star Trek. I think a lot of work should be done in this area - it could be exceptionally useful in understanding the way communication works, and also the ability of computers to understand human speech.
I found it interesting and notable that infants are more sensitive to the speech patterns of human interaction than they are to audio-visual representation of it. I think there is an important message for modern parents, here. The TV is a poor babysitter. Get the DVD player out of your minivan and start talking to your baby. I am a single father of an 8-year-old girl, and I've spent her life having conversations with her. We don't have TV reception (how un-American of us), though we do watch movies once or twice a month. I've never used "baby-talk" to relate to her, and she is consistently being praised for her precocious and mature disposition, enunciation, vocabulary, and ability to elucidate her thoughts clearly. I know that there is a separate division of developmental psychology that deals with the application of these research discoveries, so I hope that all of this will be included in practical articles in parenting periodicals and such. Too many children are being crippled by a dearth of human interaction. Otto
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.
That would be "thineself". In early modern english, the pronouns were:
m l
I, me, my/mine
thou, thee, thy/thine
he-she-it, him-her-it, his-her-its
We, us, our
ye, you, your
they, them, their
See http://alt-usage-english.org/pronoun_paradigms.ht
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
For more information, read anything by Chomsky.
I wouldn't say that since Noam Chomsky's huge body of work spans so many topics, but nonetheless he is arguably the leading theorist on the subject (not to mention stupifyingly brilliant).
Some specific titles:
* Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use
* Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures
* The Architecture of Language (Chomsky et al.)
* New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Other theoretical traditions would say that there is no innate grammar, but rather that learning a language consists of learning statistical patterns which are represented through neural activation patterns
Which partially describes Kuhl's work, which is the subject of the article. However, I would not go so far as to say that these theories must be mutually exclusive. I subscribe to Chomsky's notion of genetic predisposition toward certain innate language structures, and at the same time I see no contradiction between that theory and Kuhl's description of a possible mechanism for language-learning.
Not sure what the hell "la la da ta bwa bwa" means.
It means "I'll have what the dog is having."
Consequences ensue.
Wouldn't that be "thyself"?
-Solo
One of the problems in USA is that we tend to push english only. One of the toys that I have found to help defeat the language barriers is Neurosmith's Babbler. Basically, it plays phenomes from several other languages that we lack in English. These are from Spanish, French, and Japanese. It makes a lot of sense.
As to the multiple languages, just ask any coder who knows multiple languages in multiple paradigms. Once you get several languages down esp. with differing paradigms, then it is trivial to pick up more languages. Doing natural languages is no different.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you're gonna throw stuff like THAT into the equation, I can point to my 3.5 year old nephew who calls all chihuahua dogs "kitty", and say that it takes 3.5 years for babies to learn. Really, most language learning comes from pure exposure, not explaination. The US Army spent a year teaching me Russian, and we spent less than 20% of our time having the language mechanics explained to us in English. Most of our time was spent reading and conversing.
Essentially, it does take babies longer to learn language than adults because they have no frame of reference to build from. What's amazing is not their ability to learn a language itself, but the apparent ability to "bootstrap" themselves up from nothing via phonetic analysis. Learning a language isn't so impressive as learning what language is.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The Oxford English Dictionary Shared Source Programme, OEDSource.
We have invested huge amounts of Intellectual Property developing language as a tool that has greatly enabled the progress of science, literature, engineering and more. It is absurd that there aren't stronger safeguards to protect this investment and ensure that the rightful owners of this work are properly compensated for the benefits spoken language has brought to society.
As a Commonwealth nation with clear links to the United Kingdom, who originally developed English, we plan on vigorously enforcing our IP in this matter. We will give all US citizens a one-off opportunity to acquire English language licences, and thereby protect themselvs against future litigation. Conversational licences will cost $699 USD per node, whilst professional vocabulary and group discussion licences will start at $1399 per node.
Developers of slang or jargon will need to purchase our development tools, as will developers engaged in porting of forgeign language words into our core infrastructure.
We will be subpoena Webster's dictionary, and demonstrate that it contains millions of practically identical entries to the Oxford English Dictionary dictionary that we acquired when we bought our constitution from the United Kingdom.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.
Right, this is called the McGurk effect, and has been known since.. hmm. the mid 70's. Catch a demo here http://www.media.uio.no/personer/arntm/McGurk_engl ish.html