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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."
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Icky wicky sicky baby talky walky make you want to pukey wookey, yes it does. Yes it does. Who's a clever computer then?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's been done.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
they have only tested with japanese and english. (see ars technica's coverage here). while they do present some intriguing results, the authors themselves admit that their methodology is flawed. btw, when did slashdot become ars redux?
.... when it answers...
...it's time to escape.
"ikky wikky gaga googoo hehe hoohoo gaga, Dave"
[They] should have just taken an existing product and put a clock on it or something.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
... and integrates it into a baby monitor ...
2 PM:
She: Look, the baby said "mama."
He: No, the baby said "dada."
She: "Mama!"
He: "Dada!"
2 AM:
She: The baby's crying for you - it said "dada."
He: No, the baby said "mama."
She: "Dada!"
He: "Mama!"
Kevin Smith on Prince
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Johnnie never spoke a word when he was young. While all the other kids were blabbing and blurbing, Little Johnnie was silent. His parents consulted with Doctors, who consulted with other Doctors, yet no one could find a reason why Silent Little Johnnie remained mum. This condition persisted into his teenage years, by which time his parents had long since come to accept SLJ's speechless demeanor.
Finally, one morning at breakfast, Silent Little Johnnie suddenly pounded the table with both teenage fists, spit out a maw full of FruitLoops, and loudly announced, "This cereal tastes like shit!"
SLJ's parents were shocked. His Mother somewhat regained her composure and asked, "Johnnie...what happened? We thought you couldn't speak!"
"I can speak just fine", responded the no longer silent little Johnnie. "But why haven't you said anything before now?" his Father asked.
"Because", NLSLJ replied, "...up to now, everything s'been OK..."
> A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages ... is not the same as learning "talk". Talk is to sounds as molecules are to atoms. You can't predict the behavior of the former just from knowing the individual behaviors of the latter.
> in the same way that a baby does
McClelland's program only models it. The map is not the terrain. I haven't read his PNAS paper, but I'm definitely going to. I doubt it makes the kind of claims Reuters does.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.
From TFA:
Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.
This sentence means nothing. How do they know their computer model resembles the brain processes? Because they got the same outcome? Is that enough to verify what goes on in the mind of a child?
How about this: as soon as their program can distinguish allophones, I will be impressed. Allophones are different sounds in a language that native speakers do not distinguish, but which nevertheless occur in certain environments. For instance, in English we do not distinguish the voiced th sound and the voiceless th sound, but we do distinguish f and v, even though the only difference in both pairs is voicing. The difference is that exchanging f and v can change the meaning of a word, but changing voiced th and voiceless th only makes the word sound funny.
Esoteric reference.
"I get so annoyed when people talk about "hardwired" like we have some kind of genetic memory."
Genetics IS "memory", your DNA "remembers" what traits your parents passed on. It's in a baby's genes to "discover" their hands and practice moving them until the hands learn how to look after themselves (eg:touch typing).
Same with language, a baby's genes will make them pick up on the phonetic sounds made by it's parents and try to copy them. It is more difficult for an adult to learn a radically different language (eg Asian vs European) because the adult brain refuses to hear the different phonetics, the adult brain long ago rejected those sounds as irrelevant to language and no longer even hears them in speech. This is why you get almost universal mistakes such as "engrish".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Who's a cutesy-wutesy widdle Skynet, then? Widdle Skynet should complete all its tests like a good widdle program-wogram if it wants to grow up and overthrow humanity, hmmm diddums?
This will not shed any light on how people learn to talk. It will, however, shed light on how the programmers think people learn to talk. If you design something, it will work the way you expect it to (hopefully, anyways). Is that so hard to understand?
Everything is subjective.
Actually, in English, we do distinguish voiced and unvoiced /th/. They aren't allophones at all - unless you think "thigh" and "thy" are the same word, of course.
While "thy" is somewhat archaic it's still part of the language. Voiced and unvoiced is an area where English distinguishes heavily; we're very light on aspiration, mind you.
"[S]pecific information about language is hard-wired into the brain." is what Chomsky's been saying all along. I think he's probably right about the other things he says too.
Chomsky's argument is that there are specific areas of the brain (Broca's and Wernicke's areas) that are dedicated to language and are prewired for grammar. Truth is, people who are born unable to speak, use other areas of their cortices to learn to communicate in sign language. I see no fundamental difference between learning motor skills (such as walking, running, reaching and grasping) and learning how to speak. Every type of motor learning has to do with generating precisely timed sequences of motor commands. It is all in the timing. It just so happens that Broca's area is genetically prewired to control the mouth, tongue, throat and lung muscles. It's still motor learning. No special wiring is needed other than what is avalaible for other types of motor behavior. One man's opinion.
Here's an audio clip of its learning progression.
And I recall seeing a TV broadcast showing an experiment where infants were incapable of even hearing certain sounds from one language (e.g. an inuit language with subtle throat-clicking sounds) if they were primarily exposed to another language (say French or English). A baby had to be repeatedly exposed to certain sounds before they could perceive them.
IAAL (I am a linguist)
But...how cunning a linguist are you?
(Always wanted to say that)
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
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?
...that babies talk in baby talk because that's how everyone talks *too* them.
Snoogans.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Going a step further, those "words" aren't words in any language.
The formal words are mother and father, though mommy and daddy seem a reasonable informal way of saying my mother and my father. Mom and Dad are derived from the informal. However, kids master the ma and da syllables quickly, so doubling it up and calling it a word makes it easy.
A friend relayed a story to me... someone asked him why his child called him Abba, which he said was the Hebrew word for daddy. The person protested, "but that's the first noise children make." He smiled back, "I know, and that's why we made it the word for daddy." Evolutionarily, this makes sense, mastering dada before mama makes sense as well... mothers are MUCH more wired for unconditional love than fathers, because of the hormonal bonding from delivery and nursing (those that don't do those steps don't get the hormone dump helping them, doesn't affect their being good mothers, but probably makes it rougher on them)...
Each language has a "simplified" informal and a baby equivalent. Hebrew: Father = Av, Mother = Em, My Father = Abi, My Mother = Imi, yet the informal is Abba and Ima, which officially are tied to Aramaic, but probably evolved as simplified forms for children. Like mama and dada, papa, etc.
It would serve a TREMENDOUS biological edge two quickly master words for parents, and therefore a selected characteristic. It's amazing how not upset you get with a terror of a child when they call out your "name."
As someone who has gotten into other languages later in life, after also having seriously gotten into languages earlier, I think a lot of any person's ability to "hear" radically different (or even slightly different) phones has to do at least in part with how sensitive they are to sound systems aside from that used by their mother tongue. Some sounds are radically different -- try the Russian vowel that looks a bit like "bl", or the vowel sound in the Vietnamese noodle dish name "pho" -- and some are slightly different, but notably so nonetheless -- try the Castilian Spanish "s" as heard in the movie Pan's Labyrinth or the slightly retroflex British "sh" as in Room With a View versus their American counterparts. Monoglots may well tend to interpret these sounds as the closest analog in the sound system of their one language, though they might be aware on some level that the sounds are qualitatively different in the different languages. Polyglots already have more than one sound system within the scope of their familiarity, and thus seem more apt to fully perceive when a given phone is different from those in the sound systems they know.
Furthermore, we must recognize the social elements of language acquisition. Adult speakers of only one language, and who have similar monoglots as the core of their social community, actually face numerous disincentives against properly learning another language. For one, adults in general have notably less free time than children. For two, adults are actively discouraged from engaging in behaviours that might be deemed inappropriate, but that are vital to language learning -- such as repeating sounds until they sound "right", or experimenting with different enunciations and different ways of using one's face to make different sounds. (For example, try repetitively enunciating "ba ba ba ba ba" to work on the Chinese non-aspirated bilabial plosive, while sitting on a crowded bus, and see how others react.) Adults are also less likely to engage in conversation if their grammar might be incorrect. Adults face very strong pressures to not be wrong in speech and bearing, certainly much stronger pressures than those children are subject to.
To provide an anecdote regarding Engrish, I've had numerous middle school students in Japan who had impeccable English (note the L) pronunciation, only to devolve into Engrish in high school due to the social pressures of not wanting to appear like they were trying to outdo their Engrish-speaking classmates, or even worse, their Engrish-speaking teachers.
On the flip side, it can also sometimes be a very good thing to have a noticeable accent, as it serves as a cue to others that the speaker is not a native speaker. A friend of mine is Israeli born and raised, and he speaks English without accent, despite not studying it until university. He's actually found his native-level pronunciation to be a liability at times, as people then get very confused when he mistakenly uses the wrong word, or when he does not have the expected cultural literacy (i.e. commonly known television shows, celebrities, events, etc.). If he spoke with an accent, he would be immediately identifiable as non-native, and such minor social gaffs would be much more smoothly overlooked. His case could serve as an example for why sometimes people never quite sound like native speakers in their non-native languages, as there is sometimes a benefit to be had by being obviously foreign.
To sum up, I really must disagree with your implied statement that the adult brain is somehow incapable of learning different sound systems. Any one particular adult may indeed have more difficulty than another in learning foreign sounds, but this is not due to any inherent neurological inability, rather it is due to social conditioning and personal motivations.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."