How Infants Crack the Speech Code 506
scupper writes "Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data shows that infants use computational strategies to detect patterns in language, according to UW's Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl in the Nature article "Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code" [PMID: 15496861]
Interesting excerpt from the article: 'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules -- language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'"
I think babies learn everything better than adults (Score:3, Interesting)
With these new findings, maybe a super computer can be built with these analytical and statistical skills, then this computer can learn to speak like HAL.
nature.com is pretty slow now, given that it's using cgi-taf on a Dynapage.taf, obviously didn't read the Do-Not-Slashdot ACT 1996 [interneh.com], so here's a coral link [nyud.net].
How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does the brain develop separate neural nets for each language? Is there a composite neural net? Does it matter how similar sounding or similar in grammar these two languages are? I grew up learning Malayalam (a south indian language from the Dravidian family) and English at the same time. When I was 6, I started learning Hindi. I can speak fluent Malayalam and English and I am decently fluent in Hindi. In highschool, I started learning French and found it easy. Now, I do a lot of latin dancing and I hang around a lot of hispanic people and I've been picking up Spanish. I don't find it all that difficult to learn a language if I put my mind to it.
English and Malayalam are two radically different languages -- in sound and in grammar. I wonder how the neural nets in my brain developed to cope with this, and whether that is what makes it easy for me to pick up new languages.
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, once you finally catch up, you now have a much easier ability to learn new languages.
This all pretty makes sense to me. You're learning two languages, not one, so of course it takes longer. What I wonder, though, is what might you be be giving up to have gained the ability to quickly master languages?
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Brain tissue is incredibly expensive from an energy point of view, and it's only because we make very good use of it* that it gave us such an evolutionary advantage. It is highly adaptable, though, and in certain cases it's possible to make a partial recovery from severe brain injury, effectively through reassigning some of it to a new task.
Google found me an interesting article [theness.com] with figures and stuff, if anyone wants to read it.
(* Some politicians excepted, of course!)
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:3, Insightful)
You wont believe how often I had to explain to people, why such a notion is principally not possible.
May I point out, that Scientology, is one of the purpotraitors, that spread this LIE....well what else is one to be expected, from such an organization!
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the hard drive does not usually contain a file system that can self-repair. For example, if your FAT/FAT32 disk loses data in its index, you lose your data (unless you are very skilled with a disk editor). I've never had to try it with NTFS, but both HPFS (the OS/2 file system) and Ext2/Ext3 can completely re-build themselves (with the aid of fsck) when corrupted - I have seen this first hand on both. Chances are you will lose SOME data, but never ALL data.
Some time ago, my father had a minor stroke during the night, and woke up not remembering the last 10 years. It took us a while to work out what happened, and it was quite frustrating to be talking to him to try and work out what he remembered, then finding he had had a "reset" and forgotten the last half hour completely. We did notice that each reset brought back a large chunk of memory.
By lunch time his brain had finished running fsck, and he had all his memory up to and including the night before (but no memory of that morning).
He had various scans etc to confirm the stroke, but they really just confirmed what happened.
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are stories of people being able to undestand it without actively listening to it, and I once read about a ham that was listening to morse and as the sender increased speed, the ham thought to himself "when did he switch to voice?"
The real high speed receivers recognise whole words and sentences in morse as the letters are too fast to hear individually, the same way we hear words and not just sy
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Informative)
Since we use a small fraction of our brain
No. We use all [brainconnection.com] of it.
Neurosmith Babbler (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the problems in USA is that we tend to push english only. One of the toys that I have found to help defeat the language barriers is Neurosmith's Babbler. Basically, it plays phenomes from several other languages that we lack in English. These are from Spanish, French, and Japanese. It makes a lot of sense.
As to the multiple languages, just ask any coder who knows multiple languages in multiple paradigms. Once you get several languages down esp. with differing paradigms, then it is trivial to pick up more languages. Doing natural languages is no different.
Re:Neurosmith Babbler (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when I was in my rate 20's, one of my roommates was a japanese. He came to CSU to learn engrish and to get a bacheror. For about 3 months, we ate runch. Needress to say, that after 8 years of engrish, he could read at a rever that wourd enabre him to get by. But he courd not understand what was being said. It took more than 3 months of talking day and night before he understood that english has l's. Finally, he could pass his toful tests
Basically, if you can not hear the difference in syllables, then you can not learn.
It is no different than an english speaker learning spanish, japenese, french, German, Russian, arabic, etc.
Re:Neurosmith Babbler (Score:5, Insightful)
So since the world is extreamly multilingual, its better for people to be multilingual.
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. My brain doesn't distinguish between German and Japanese, it merely rates them as "not English." For example, watching a Japanese program teaching German, I find that when they jump from German to Japanese, it takes a second for my brain to register, "Oh, wait, comprehension just dropped from 100% to 30%."
When you're speaking a language, the best technique involves ignoring that it's a foreign language at all (yeah, it's a Zen thing.) Think of it like a computer: running natively always works better than emulation. Therefore, there's no flag that pops up saying, "They are now speaking German," etc. You either can understand it or you can't.
2. I find that Japanese is easy to master from a phonetic and mannerism standpoint, because I already overcame the mental hurdles once with German. It's easier to divorce myself from my original language and cultural frame of reference in order to allow me to accept the differences of Japanese language and culture at face value, rather than digging my heels in and saying, "This is strange, this is weird, this is hard."
3. There definitely is a phonotactic structure to every language that one learns. (I recently figured this out; good to know there's a name for it.) Basically, I can see a word and say, "That can't be a Japanese word," or "That can't be German," just like I can do in my own native English. This particular knack doesn't even require that high a level of mastery of grammar or vocabulary; it seems to work on a sub-conscious level as the brain accumulates experience and cross-references it against everything else you've learned so far.
Basically, take a page out of the baby's book. I think it's definitely the blank canvas and the lack of conditioned structure that allows them to adapt so flexibly to learning language. Even as adults, if we can allow ourselves to relax and accept a foreign language without mentally pausing every other word to register that it's foreign, mastering a new one isn't as bad as you think.
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:3, Interesting)
4 years after begining to learn German, I started learning Japanese. It was very easy to grasp the grammar. While Japanese is usually taught by "patterns" to Americans, I was able to identify the more complex structures underlying everything rath
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:5, Funny)
How do you say "Palindrome" in Malayalam?
LK
Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu (Score:5, Insightful)
The conclusion: we should be focusing education during the younger years on areas where youth is an advantage. Children should be brought up multilingual rather than spending years learning it poorly in high school and college. We should care more about art, music and exploration in younger years, even if it means that math and others are pushed back a few years.
Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that a greater focus on language skills earlier in the educational process will yields better results later on because it will provide a better foundation for learning. In other words, science would be much easier to learn with a greater demand of the language.
As far as being multilingual, who decides what the student's second language should be?
I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:4, Interesting)
One interesting thing is that she certainly communicates her needs. For her, crying that is accompanied by head-nods and one foot kicking means "I'm hungry" (and, yes, there's quite a lot of crying with head-nods and foot kicks ;).
What's interesting is that she had that behavior almost as soon as she was born -- and I don't think every kid does the same thing.
Point is that it seems like she was born with a bit of language (mixed verbal + sign) but that it's not the same languge other kids are born with -- I think each has his/her own.
Verbally, she'll now stick out her tongue when I do, but she doesn't seem to even speak "babytalk" yet -- mostly cries and cooes...
It's fun stuff!
Re:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind your brain is still growing when you are a child. Once you hit the late teens, your brain's done growing, and it has to live with just rewiring its existing neurons to adapt to things quickly.
Children, honestly, are far smarter than adults are - it's too bad that our most brilliant years are wasted due to having extremely limited information. It's also important for parents to realize that their kids are far more capable than they think they are - lack of knowledge should never be construed as lack of intelligence. Parents often tell children "you wouldn't understand" when, in truth, the children probably would understand, possibly even better than the parents.
With these new findings, maybe a super computer can be built with these analytical and statistical skills, then this computer can learn to speak like HAL.
I'm really interested in the idea that children classify things via phoneme classification and statistical analysis. This sounds remarkably like a "universal translator" from Star Trek. I think a lot of work should be done in this area - it could be exceptionally useful in understanding the way communication works, and also the ability of computers to understand human speech.
grammar (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:grammar (Score:5, Informative)
There are computer programs that can recognize words (voice recognition), but how many programs can (with a large rate of success) recognize the words and map them to their meanings, or context? The point about the neural net is also interesting. It would seem that the brain is programmed to understand a certain language better. Does that mean that people who have learnt a certain language, can learn a similar language easily? The article seems to suggest that if the neural net is built in a certain way, it might be easy to learn similar sounding languages, but a language with a very similar grammar, but different sounds might be difficult? Would be interesting to pursue and find out...
Re:grammar (Score:5, Informative)
Other theoretical traditions would say that there is no innate grammar, but rather that learning a language consists of learning statistical patterns which are represented through neural activation patterns. For them, grammar will follow lexical acquisition. Other argue that the lexicon is effectively the grammar. For more information, read anything by Elman or Bates. Both the latter have articles online which can easily be found by googling, but I'm a lazyarse and can't be bothered to do it.
Chomsky (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't say that since Noam Chomsky's huge body of work spans so many topics, but nonetheless he is arguably the leading theorist on the subject (not to mention stupifyingly brilliant).
Some specific titles:
* Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use
* Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures
* The Architecture of Language (Chomsky et al.)
* New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Other theoretical traditions would say that there is no innate grammar, but rather that learning a language consists of learning statistical patterns which are represented through neural activation patterns
Which partially describes Kuhl [washington.edu]'s work, which is the subject of the article. However, I would not go so far as to say that these theories must be mutually exclusive. I subscribe to Chomsky's notion of genetic predisposition toward certain innate language structures, and at the same time I see no contradiction between that theory and Kuhl's description of a possible mechanism for language-learning.
Inate Universal Grammar (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall hearing something to that effect in my cognitive psychology classes too. IIRC, children seem to almost inately understand certain grammatical concepts such as putting words in the past tense or forming the plural of a word.
Chomsky has/had a theory about children being hard-wired with the basic rules of a universal grammar, and I think this research was examining that theory...
There was a video of a researcher showing young child a stuffed toy called a "wug". The child was shown another wug and was asked how many there were now, and the child indicated that there were two wugs, without being told what the plural for wug was.
Later on in the video, the researcher told the child that the the wug likes to "gling" every day. Today the wug glings. When asked what the wug did yesterday, the child replied that the wug glinged, which is a grammatically correct past test expression of the "word" gling.
The study was conducted with a number of participants, and the results were statistically significant. Admittedly, the subjects were 4-year olds (and not infants), but it is unlikely that children of that age were given formal instructions on the rules of grammar.
I wonder if further studies were able to prove or disprove the hypothesis that children seem hard-wired with certain grammatical rules?
Re:grammar (Score:3, Interesting)
To a certain extent, yeah. My daughter can only say a few words, but when she makes up words and tries to ask questions she understands the final rising pitch, the palms-up hand gestures, etc. The final rising pitch is common in Western languages but when I learned some Cantonese it was surprising to say "Is Daddy Here?" as "Daddy Is Daddy Isn't Here" where the pitches are part of vocabulary and the question imparts none.
Still,
Re:grammar (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here. Here at slashdot we teach our young to do something early in life called "getting their first 'first post'". It earns them respect for many months onward and gives them time to culminate an emotional system, although it wont be used much, apart from to feel anger, disappointment and astonishment at the rate of articles with old or duplicated, often even multiple times, content. Oh, and not to forget jealousy and awe towards what we here call "pr0n". Then a few years down the line they learn how to type one handed and structure not only sentences with words consisting of 40 or so phonemes, but also 10 numerical digits, for example;
"7h15 c4k3 15 t45t3y m4n!!1!"
Although this habbit is soon dropped at later life when they realise how lame it looks, and how difficult it is to read. It is around this time that the child becomes aware to Microsoft's evil scummy contribution to the world and Linux/Mac gains another trusty young, propeller-headed, google-loving, virgin fanboy.
Doesn't explain (Score:5, Funny)
ga ga goo goo.
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:4, Funny)
However, he seems to realize that he shouldn't repeat some 'bad' words that we use. He has never mimiced any curse words that he has heard, yet can spew whole phrases about what I'm telling my wife to do
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:5, Funny)
They can't walk properly, they can't put objects where they want them, they can't stop themselves from pissing or worse. And above all, they keep getting picked up. You'd want to swear under those conditions.
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, the worst fear of any
The first time I heard "DA-DA" (Score:2, Funny)
"DA-DA, where's MA-MA?"
Maybe that explains... (Score:2)
Re:Maybe that explains... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe that explains... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe that explains... (Score:4, Informative)
I, me, my/mine
thou, thee, thy/thine
he-she-it, him-her-it, his-her-its
We, us, our
ye, you, your
they, them, their
See http://alt-usage-english.org/pronoun_paradigms.ht
Re:Maybe that explains... (Score:4, Informative)
Not all infants (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not all infants (Score:2)
Damn, maybe it's the politics thread right below this one, but you beat me to the punch on making almost that exact same statement.
/me toasts to the AC and his quick wit
Re:Not all infants (Score:5, Insightful)
The one exception I can think of is that the way he pronounces "Abu Gharib" may be a more accurate rendition of the actual Arabic than English-speaking non-phonologists can usually manage. It would indicate a failure to learn English phonology if he was unable to mangle Arabic like everyone else does. (Phonologists, of course, train themselves to say all sorts of things that are unavailable in their native language)
In fact, Bush's main speech issues are that when he pauses, he tends to pause for a long time, and he tends to paraphrase himself to fill up time. It's not hard to understand what he's trying to say because he doesn't speak English well, but rather because he doesn't know what he's trying to say.
Re:Not all infants (Score:3, Funny)
Pretty much kiboshes the "brain still empty" [slashdot.org] theory, too.
Re:Not all infants (Score:3, Insightful)
I just don't understand why making fun of George W. Bush makes you a liberal, a hater of America, a hater in general, a friend of terrorists, or a treasonist bastach.
The guy once said "I know how hard is for you to put food on your family", case dismissed.
Re:Not all infants (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the new rule for presidential candidates is no malapropisms, no dyslexia, no gaffes, no speech disorders or impediments of any kind.
Re:Not all infants (Score:3, Insightful)
Where from ShieldWolf's comment did you get that notion? All the man was saying was "Bush has a problem communicating." Can't you agree with that statement? We could easily go back and forth on whether Bush has other positive factors that make up for this, or even whether it is important that the president be a great communicator.
Likewise, we can agree that Kerry'
The Matrix (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a plan to me. [grin]
Analyse ambient sounds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or to simplify the vocabulary a little, "copy what they hear the most of".
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Analyse ambient sounds? (Score:2)
Re:Analyse ambient sounds? (Score:5, Insightful)
How'd they figure this out? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How'd they figure this out? (Score:5, Funny)
But can they... (Score:2, Funny)
The article states that babies learn the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
The question becomes now, can we take this data and apply it to teaching languages?
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the article summary sez:
Clear enough?Expose your children to as many languages as you can, in their infancy and beyond. The more languages they hear sounds from, the better.
This effect might explain why my kids have all been a little slow in talking: they are hearing two languages, with very different sets of phonemes at home, and have to decode and make sense of both.
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:3, Interesting)
BACKGROUND
I spent from 3-13 years old being taught(in the public schools, yes I have ridden the short bus home a few times(when I was like 4)) how to speak and pronounce certain sounds(English: the R sound(think Elmer Fudd's pronounciation, I sounded like that), SH, CH, and one or two more I think). (Actually it wasn't just that, but also controlling the pit
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:3, Interesting)
I've known many multi-lingual children, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't speed them up. Of course, many is a few dozen, and I don't have any hard data, anyway, but I do think that if it's going to have any affect, it'll be to s
Don't believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't believe it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't believe it... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody is saying that adults can't ever reach fluency. The claim is that as you get older your ability to learn languages decreases rapidly. If both you and a five year old are immersed in a foreign language environment, she will (barring a huge exception) inevitably end up speaking the language better than you. You need to distinguish between fluency and *native* fluency. Adults who are able to achieve fluency that is comparable to that of a native speaker are very rare, and while the limits vary from person to person there will almost always be a wall past which one cannot progress.
For example, children start having trouble being able to hear the difference between sounds that are non-constrastive in their native languages as early as 18 months. If you poke around in the literature on developmental psychology, you'll probably come across stories about "Jeanie", a strange case of a child who was basically locked in a dark room for her entire childhood. Despite sincere attempts, there was no success in teaching her anything that resembled a human language.
There was also a recent study done on Nicaraguan Sign Language(a form of sign language that's being invented as we speak by deaf children who had no previous access to sign language). It's an interesting case, because the language originates from a school in Managua so every year a fresh group of first year kids are newly exposed to it by their older peers. Over the years NSL has evolved substantially from a more iconic gesture-like system to one that is begining to demonstrate hallmarks of universal linguistic properties, such as the building of hierarchical phrase structures and the serialization of complex ideas into separate words. This has happened rapidly, so the younger kids sign quite differently than the older ones. The older kids, and especially the young adults who were among the first NSL speaking classes, have retained the more primitive gestural components of the language and are basically stuck in that pattern, more or less unable to augment their signing skills with the newer features. The conclusion reached by the study is that not only do young children have a better time learning language, but they also seem to have a brain that's specially adapted to the creation of language from scratch, an adaptation which does not appear to be similarly shared in mature adults. Cool stuff.
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're gonna throw stuff like THAT into the equation, I can point to my 3.5 year old nephew who calls all chihuahua dogs "kitty", and say that it takes 3.5 years for babies to learn. Really, most language learning comes from pure exposure, not explaination. The US Army spent a year teaching me Russian, and we spent less than 20% of our time having the language mechanics explained to us in English. Most of our time was spent reading and conversing.
Essentially, it does take babies longer to learn language than adults because they have no frame of reference to build from. What's amazing is not their ability to learn a language itself, but the apparent ability to "bootstrap" themselves up from nothing via phonetic analysis. Learning a language isn't so impressive as learning what language is.
Confirms a suspicion I've had all along (Score:5, Interesting)
She's four years old now and is totally in love with Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon [eternalsailormoon.org], a live action show. Now, her reading isn't up to snuff to actually keep up with the captions, but she loves the pretty girls going shopping, singing, and fighting evil.
And now she takes that same cadence and rhythm from the long exposure to spoken and sung Japanese and will faithfully reproduce the words of songs, or will chatter in a kind of pseudo-Japanese when playing by herself. Yet her English is accentless. Clearly, there's some kind of organizational process going on in that cute little head.
Yeah, we're probably setting her up to get ostrasized in school, but then again, if she'd just pick up on some of those fighting techniques, that might not happen either!
Re:Confirms a suspicion I've had all along (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually a regular occurence with children who learn multiple languages before puberty. Typically, when you learn two or more languages before you reach puberty, you are able to speak both without a discernable accent.
If you were to take your daughter to Japanese classes at this age, odds are that she would grow up able to speak Japanese without an English accent and vice-versa.
Re:Confirms a suspicion I've had all along (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed! Once she can master shooting fireballs from her fists and jumping over buildings, i doubt she'll have much trouble in kindergarten!
Someone needs to do something (Score:5, Funny)
But what can we as a nation do? We do not need any additional laws, we must only enforce the laws we have. Reverse engineering of this and other national secrets is strictly forbidden by the DMCA. Just because they are minors doesn't mean we can't sue them.
Introducing OEDSource (Score:4, Funny)
We have invested huge amounts of Intellectual Property developing language as a tool that has greatly enabled the progress of science, literature, engineering and more. It is absurd that there aren't stronger safeguards to protect this investment and ensure that the rightful owners of this work are properly compensated for the benefits spoken language has brought to society.
As a Commonwealth nation with clear links to the United Kingdom, who originally developed English, we plan on vigorously enforcing our IP in this matter. We will give all US citizens a one-off opportunity to acquire English language licences, and thereby protect themselvs against future litigation. Conversational licences will cost $699 USD per node, whilst professional vocabulary and group discussion licences will start at $1399 per node.
Developers of slang or jargon will need to purchase our development tools, as will developers engaged in porting of forgeign language words into our core infrastructure.
We will be subpoena Webster's dictionary, and demonstrate that it contains millions of practically identical entries to the Oxford English Dictionary dictionary that we acquired when we bought our constitution from the United Kingdom.
Wow (Score:2, Funny)
And for parents (Score:3, Funny)
Not sure what the hell "la la da ta bwa bwa" means.
John/
Re:And for parents (Score:3, Funny)
It means "I'll have what the dog is having."
Somebody's been watching the smart kids (Score:2)
I remember it well in '59 (Score:3, Funny)
I used the 'hot wire' method, 'cos Cobol wasn't invented.
The Real Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that difficult... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that difficult... (Score:3, Interesting)
One school thinks that the very early babbling and screaches and crying that a baby does actually works out the vocal cords and allows them to experiment with new sounds, learning how to make new sounds and such. You'll also notice that early on, babies ten
Explains a lot (Score:5, Funny)
No wonder babies are so socially awkward, they're statisticians.
Yeah (Score:3, Funny)
Good, but what about sign language? (Score:3, Interesting)
Babies are like sponges (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is, I don't think it's for simply learning a language. A baby is like an incredibly sponge of information. Of course they are...they have nothing else to do but just soak in their surroundings and learn. And learn. And learn some more.
In addition to being a bit more receptive to learning (and having nothing better to do), I think the younger mind also learns at a higher rate because they don't have to UNLEARN so much, or go around all the rules they've been taught for the past decade or two. Just soak it in, and you're done.
Re:Babies are like sponges (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Fascinating (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a great interest in language (and dialects) and am currently teaching myself Japanese and then Dutch (I pick the easy ones right?) and I've always thought that if I were to just learn their language with materials from grade schools and stuff like that, it would be much easier to learn. Think about it, remember all those dumb little rules about language you learn when you're little? Well, you learn that in grade school, with materials geared for children. The "teach yourself japanese" stuff out there does not address things in as simple a manner, which really is best to do if its a completely alien way of thinking (order of japanese sentences compared to english).
I wonder if one day when they can make "brain software" if they'll be able to translate this concept into software to help us learn native languages.
Perhaps a more practical present use for it would be to create an automatic language deciphering device, much like you would see on Star Trek.
Feral Children (Score:5, Interesting)
It was based on a book called Genie [amazon.com].
Feral Children, as they call it, is an interesting and well studied topic on psychology.
What they dont explain (Score:5, Funny)
In my neighborhood (Score:5, Interesting)
I frequently hear the kids use a mix of language as they play. One kid may yell in Spanish and get their answer in Hmoung - but they know what each other is saying. Less often (but it still happens) is one of the kids will talk to another kid in "their" language rather than the one they are most familiar with.
As the kids age, it seems that they become a little more entrenched in their home lanuage and English. The Hmoung kids speak English without a trace of accent which really impresses me because their parents don't speak it at all and rely on the kids to be interpeters.
All of the kids really impress me. When I was a child, you would have never seen a neighborhood so integrated. All of the parents make an effort to get along, all of the kids - they just simply get along, they don't even notice the differences!
They learn to get the point across FAST (Score:3, Interesting)
Now what about reading, do the same thoughts hold true about a child ability to learn to read and when is a good time to start them?
Human interaction (Score:3, Insightful)
Programming Languages (Score:3, Interesting)
Base language flexibilities? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that native speakers of asian languages either have the hardest time or the easiest time learning new languages... but that's just my limited observation and likely to be highly skewed.
But as a resident of Texas, I am exposed quite frequently to English (Germanic root) and Spanish (Latin root) language variants (think inner city). I don't find it at all difficult to pick up new bits of language whether it's English, Spanish or even of some asian origin such as Mandarin or Korean. Not bragging since I'm not functional in any language except English and that's a subjective measure.
I once heard a Turkish guy suggest to me that he coule probably learn new languages better than me simply because my native language is English and that Turkish offers a much more versatile base for learning languages. You can imagine how insulted I felt when someone suggested they could do something better than me based on something like that. So I wonder if there is a statistical advantage to various languages as a basis for learning others?
How Students Crack Nature Reviews Neuroscience (Score:3, Interesting)
What's not clear to me is the value in Slashdot putting up a pointer to an article that can only be read with subscription service that costs an arm and a leg, and is usually only freely available only to lucky folks in the
Finally, let me drop my 2 cents on the original posting that cited the paper as saying about infants: "They also learn phonotactic rules".
This statement is phrased rather loosely. Just because infants' behavior indicates that they can determine whether stimuli correspond or do not correspond to a rule certainly does not mean that the mental representation system that afforded this discrimination actually works by representing anything akin to rules.
You don't need a rule-based system to be able to determine whether a certain input corresponds or doesn't correspond to a set of constraints (see the classical debates between Pinker and McLelland on the acquisition of the past-tense in English).
Saying that infants learn "rules" is therefore a bit misleading.
Second hand take on it. (Score:3, Interesting)
She's come across several (and I myself at my workplace) children who were taught from the get-go spanish and english side by side. (Due to parents reading that teaching a child a second language will make it a genius or some such)
Result? at 2 or 3 years of age the child knows some english, some spanish, neither one as well as would be normal for the age, and cant differentiate between the two languages (ie, speaks in a mixture of both depending on which words come to mind)
I've got no problem with languages, and I do think children should be taught at least one, however from my experiences and reading it seems like one should at least hold off until the kid has a solid grasp on a primary language to start in on a second one.
Could someone well versed in linguistics comment on this? It could be just my location (backwoods, basically) and a string of people who havent implemented teaching 2 languages in a method that would avoid the scenario i described
Re:Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Not everybody thinks in language regardless... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What language do babies think in? (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me about an article I read in SciAm or American Scientist some time ago. Some scientists had performed an experiment with kids at an early age (I can't remember the specific age, around 1 year I think). They had taught the kids a simple ball game. The kids had at that point not learned the proper word for "ball" etc.
A year later the scientists visited again, and asked if the kids could describe the game for them. They found that wh
Re:She gave at talk at SFN (Score:3, Informative)