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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.'"
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!
While the world WOULD be better if everyone spoke the same language..thats not the way the world IS.
So since the world is extreamly multilingual, its better for people to be multilingual.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.