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Computer Program Learns Baby Talk in Any Language
athloi writes "Researchers have made a computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does. The program will help to shed new light on how people learn to talk. It has already raised questions as to how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain."
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Yes and no. On one hand, I remember hearing that babies have the potential to lean any language. Take a Chinese orphan, and bring them to America, and they will learn English no problem, with no accent. All babies have the potential to learn any language (or many languages). On the other hand, my laugh sounds exactly like my dad's. Not surprising until you find that I didn't live with my dad and didn't really spend much time with him at all. Many of our mannerisms are also the same. Like the way we walk, with a one hand in my pocket. The resemblence between our personalities is uncanny considering we didn't live together. So I have to ask, how much is based on what we see, and how much is based on our genes. The old nature vs. nurture question.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It would appear that Chomsky et al have found that there is a "grammar engine" hard wired in the mind which assimilates the local grammar until about the age of seven when the brain reorders itself. He makes interesting case studies of pidgin languages where the several different languages are forced together, the first generation develops a common vocabulary but children born into this culture develop the formal grammar. Worth a read.
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IAAL, and although not a child language specialist, I will say one thing: children make plenty of meaningless sound before the start making sense, and more interestingly, they become able to tell their future native language apart from other languages quicker than they become able to understand it. (And I'll even be as daring to suggest that it simply has to be this way; you need to be able to tell signal from noise before you can decode a signal.)
I also think that by calling this a "technology," you're fundamentally misunderstanding it. It's a computer program being used as a test of a model of phonological learning.
I think you've got it exactly backwards here. The whole point this is demonstrate a model that loses the ability to tell allophones apart. I.e., that makes the jump from perceiving a speech stream as a continuous sequence of sounds laid out on a continuous acoustic space, to perceiving it as a sequence of discretely distinct segments.
Of course, a major disclaimer: I haven't seen the actual research, so I don't know to what extent they've met these goals.
Are you adequate?
The feedback loop is essential. There is an anecdote Linguists learn on the subject of language acquisition: A couple, both of whom were deaf for non-genetic reasons, had a hearing child. Since the parents could only communicate in sign language they plopped the kid in front of the TV a lot, thinking he could pick up spoken English from the TV. At 3 the child had developed at a completely normal rate in acquiring... sign language; he had not learned one word of spoken English.
As others have pointed out, this is one of the genetic aspects of learning a language. We are "hard-wired", if you will, to socialize, particularly with our parents, and are predisposed to ascribing meaning to the sounds we make to each other. This is of course a vast over-simplification, but I'll leave the detailed explanations to others in this thread; I just wanted to add that anecdote.
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