How Infants Crack the Speech Code

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.'"

Re:grammar

[vivin]

Yes, in a manner of speaking. They first learn what the language is supposed to sound like. The abstract tells us how the infants form words and sentences, but it doesn't tell us how they map the sounds to their meanings/contexts. Maybe the main article goes into more detail. I think the word/sound->meaning/context mapping would be interesting to study.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

There are various theories. In the generative tradition, humans are born with a vast amount of knowledge about language. In that sense they already know "grammar" before they learn individual words. On the other hand, to work out the settings for the various innate parameters they have to be able to segment into words, so many linguists would probably say that "grammar" acquisition runs alongside lexical acquisition. For more information, read anything by Chomsky.

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.

Re:The article states that babies learn the same w

[RealAlaskan]

I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue ...

Well, the article summary sez:

Young infants are sensitive to subtle differences between all phonetic units, whereas older children lose their sensitivity to distinctions that are not used in their native language.

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:Maybe that explains...

[bersl2]

It wouldn't be a "problem" if current English had a more formal way of differentiating 2nd-person singular from 2nd-person plural. We use "you all" or "you guys" because we don't use "thou" and "ye" anymore.

Re:Babies are like sponges

[math major]

The critical period theory, that a child can only acquire a first language until the beginning of puberty, has been confirmed in many case studies. For obvious ethical reasons, these experiments cannot be set up intentionally, but in cases such as a severely abused child who was never exposed to language until about age 10, a woman who was deaf until a surgery when she was 30, the peopl e who have not yet reached puberty are still able to learn a language normally, and the rest are not. I strongly recommend reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker if you are interested. Pinker also discusses differences between learning a language and learning other things. For example, in most other things children learn, they see exactly what is done and then mimic it. However, learning language also gives a child the ability to create a sentence he has never heard before. Additionally, language is learned with no formal instruction, whereas other skills must be taught actively.

Re:The article states that babies learn the same w

[antifoidulus]

How about grammar though. For instance, I work with a lot of Chinese people on a daily basis. Even though they may spell the words correctly, their grammar is just terrible(often to the point that I don't know what they are saying). Is our brain also wired to only accept certain classes of grammars? For example in Chinese verbs aren't really conjugated, (well not conjugated in the same sense as say French verbs) If you want to say did not go, you just use the word for not in front of go. If you say something happened yesterday, you don't need to specify that the verb is past tense(For example I could say: Yesterday I go to the store). This can lead to a lot of very confused English. Is it a case of trying to draw parellels to languages where they don't exist or is it that the way people's brains are wired if they learn Chinese as their native tongue, they have a much harder time processing both English phenomes and grammar.

Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[Anonymous Coward]

factors? in order:
family, school, geography, history.

Re:Maybe that explains...

[Acy James Stapp]

That would be "thineself". In early modern english, the pronouns were:

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.htm l

Chomsky

[base_chakra]

For more information, read anything by Chomsky.

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.

Re:Maybe that explains...

[solowlr]

Wouldn't that be "thyself"?

Obligatory Simpsons quote

[MachDelta]

Bart:

Here, I've listened to nothing but French for the past deux mois, et je ne sais pas un mot!

(two months, and I don't know a word!)

Mais, je parle Francais maintenant! Incroyable!
(My, I speak French now! Incredible!)

Hey, Monsieur, aidez-moi! Ces deux types me font travailler jour et nuit. Ils ne me donnent pas `a manger, ils me font dormir par terre, ils mettent de l'antifreeze dans le vin, et ils ont donn'e mon chapeau rouge `a l'ane.
(Hey sir, help me! These two guys make me work day and night. They don't feed me, they make me sleep on the ground, they put antifreeze in the wine, and they gave my red hat to the donkey.)

Officer:

De l'antifreeze dans le vin? Ah mais c'est s'erieux, ca! Viens avec moi, fiston, tu n'as plus rien `a craindre!

(Antifreeze in the wine? This is serious indeed! Come with me, boy, you've got nothing to fear anymore!)

(PS: Not my translation, so don't shoot the messanger please ;))

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[Squiffy]

Since we use a small fraction of our brain

No. We use all [brainconnection.com] of it.

Re:Not all infants

[goon america]

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.

Then there's always the earpiece theory [salon.com]: Bush talks that way, long pauses and seemingly paraphrasing because he's actually listening to someone else telling him what to say and going off of that.

Here's another example:

if you watch

the press conference [whitehouse.gov] starting at about 13:23, Bush is going through a list of names of Al Qaeda terrorists they have caught and he stumbles over the name of Ramzi Binalshibh, eventually calling him Ramzi Alshibh. He jokingly apologizes to Ramzi if he got his name wrong and then, at 13:32, he looks down and to his right intently for about 2 seconds, like he is listening to something, and looks up and says "Binalshibh, excuse me."

The press conference in question is here [whitehouse.gov], and I thought that this photo [mac.com] interesting.

Re:She gave at talk at SFN

[Oori]

Right, this is called the McGurk effect, and has been known since.. hmm. the mid 70's. Catch a demo here http://www.media.uio.no/personer/arntm/McGurk_engl ish.html

Re:Don't believe it...

[foqn1bo]

IAAGSIL(I Am A Grad Student In Linguistics)

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.