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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?
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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"
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.
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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