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."

Comments

how much hard-wired information

[zobier]

It has already raised questions as to how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain. Really, I'm interested in how much specific information about language is hard-wired into this program.

IAAL, too

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

IAAL (I am a linguist), and I believe you are correct. Language is a colligation of sound and meaning, but this technology merely distinguishes sounds: it is a vastly simplified model, not of how children acquire language, but of how children pick up phones. The phone is the most basic unit of the physical (sound) aspect of language, so if this technology is to have any use at all, it has a very long way to go.

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.

How about this: as soon as their program can distinguish allophones, I will be impressed.

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.

Re:Genetics IS a form of memory.

[orcrist]

Interesting, I never thought about a "feedback loop" in that way. But now you mention it, it makes (evolutionary) sense that important words (for a baby) would correlate to simple and consistent sounds the parents can pick out and reinforce.

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.