Slashdot Mirror
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."
01100111011011110110111100100000011001110110111101 10111100100000011001110110000101101000001000000110 01110110000101101000
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
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.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Simpsons already did everything
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..."
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, 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.