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.'"

Analyse ambient sounds?

[mccalli]

There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language

Or to simplify the vocabulary a little, "copy what they hear the most of".

Cheers,
Ian

The article states that babies learn the same way

[antifoidulus]

regardless of their native tongue. 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(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa). The summary doesn't state if perhaps we are teaching language the wrong way. I know that our ability to learn languages decreases as we grow older, but I seriously think there is something lacking in the way languages are presented in high school/college.
The question becomes now, can we take this data and apply it to teaching languages?

Not that difficult...

[Belial6]

Watch a baby for it first year, and listen to it. You will find that babies just start making noise from thier mouths. When the sounds match what the other people say, they do it more, and when they get rewards for making certain sounds they really go with those. You know like when they say MAMA, and everyone in the room goes crazy. It's simple, and well known.

Re:Analyse ambient sounds?

[TopShelf]

The headline should read, "new study discovers academic rewording for common-sense explanation of phenomenon."

Babies are like sponges

[chia_monkey]

This goes along with a few other theories of learning. It's often been suggested that it's much easier to learn a language at an early age than it is when you're older. I remember picking up French back in sixth grade and wanting to take more classes but we moved and they didn't offer a language until high school in my new town. By that point, I took Spanish and yet kept throwing in a French accent, French numbers, French alphabet, etc. Think of how quickly a baby picks up a language as opposed to an older person. It's a world of difference.

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Don't believe it...

[Belial6]

Don't believe it. It takes most humans ~2 years to learn to speak their native tounge enough to call them fluent, and then they still have a limited vocabulary. If you take an adult and put them in an environment that has no one who speaks their native language, and many people who will have infinite patience in teaching their language to you, you will be able to speak it in less than 2 years. The myth that children learn language faster is created because standards are lower, and adults have a lot more to distract them, so the spend less time over an equivelent period, actually trying to learn the language.

Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[pavon]

Studies show that starting kids late on lanuguage greatly hampers their ability to learn their lanugage. But they also show that starting kids early or late on arithmatic does not have any meaningfull impact in the long run. So somethings are more affected by age than others.

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:Not all infants

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like John Kerry has any better idear as to what good English and pronunciation are all about.

Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[nharmon]

I'd mod you up if I had points, but alas, I will expand on what you said.

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?

Re:Not all infants

[iabervon]

Actually, Bush does very well at what infants are learning during this period. All of the junk he says sounds just like English. Had he failed to make the step that they describe, he would have a randomly-varying accent and accidentally say things that sound Hindi or French. It may not be easy to tell what he's trying to say, but it's always clearly English he's trying to say it in.

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:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[barawn]

I think babies learn everything better than adults. I will stick to my 'brain is still empty' theory :) As we grow, we have more spyware/adware installed, and things tend to go more slowly.

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.

Re:Doesn't explain

[angle_slam]

It was a joke, but there are several reasonable explanations for it. (1) swear words are said differently than normal words. Unless you swear a lot, your swear words are probably limited to more stressful situations. Thus, more noticeable to the child. (2) the parent's reaction to the word. Whether the reaction laughing at the word or saying, "you can't say that," the child knows that certain words get a lot of attention from the parents. Therefore, they are more memorable.

Human interaction

[Otto-matic]

I found it interesting and notable that infants are more sensitive to the speech patterns of human interaction than they are to audio-visual representation of it. I think there is an important message for modern parents, here. The TV is a poor babysitter. Get the DVD player out of your minivan and start talking to your baby. I am a single father of an 8-year-old girl, and I've spent her life having conversations with her. We don't have TV reception (how un-American of us), though we do watch movies once or twice a month. I've never used "baby-talk" to relate to her, and she is consistently being praised for her precocious and mature disposition, enunciation, vocabulary, and ability to elucidate her thoughts clearly. I know that there is a separate division of developmental psychology that deals with the application of these research discoveries, so I hope that all of this will be included in practical articles in parenting periodicals and such. Too many children are being crippled by a dearth of human interaction. Otto

Re:Not all infants

[ShieldWolf]

You don't have to be a lefty or have hate to acknowledge that Bush has a problem communicating. His stump speech, his GOP acceptance speech AND the debates all contained jokes where HE HIMSELF said that he has a problem speaking.

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:I think babies learn everything better than adu

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain is NOT empty. They know where the wai (Hawaiian means both breast and milk which makes sense if there were no other milk bearing animals) is. They can hang on. Initially with fingers and toes. They have heard a lot before drying off but I don't know if this makes any difference. Controversial subject.

Re:Doesn't explain

[Wolfier]

Swearwords are designed to be phonetically more impressive. Having a lasting impression is one of their purposes.

Neurosmith Babbler

[WindBourne]

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:Not all infants

[Brandybuck]

The guy once said "I know how hard is for you to put food on your family", case dismissed.

I guess the new rule for presidential candidates is no malapropisms, no dyslexia, no gaffes, no speech disorders or impediments of any kind.

Re:The article states that babies learn the same w

[Dun Malg]

Does "doggy" refer to creatures with four legs, with fur, with four legs and fur, with a tail, with long ears, to an animal? You can check with your tutor that you've understood the referent, but babies can't do that.

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.

Re:Don't believe it...

[iabervon]

This research shows that, if you learn a language as an adult, your pronunciation will suck. Children are primed to learn to sound like a native speaker, whereas adults will learn to speak with an accent and be unable to hear distinctions not present in languages they learned as infants. If you were to spend 2 years speaking Hindi, you'd be able to speak Hindi fluently, but you'd still mess up the aspirated consonants. If you learn Greek as an adult, you'll never get the gammas in quite the right place, and if you learn Xhosa now, you'll be forever making the wrong clicks.

Of course, native speakers mess up their phonology frequently enough (due to having their mouths full, singing, or something) that people will still understand you perfectly well. But you'll get things consistantly wrong that people who learned as infants only mess up on occasion.

Re:Neurosmith Babbler

[WindBourne]

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:Not all infants

[Galvatron]

I guess the new rule for presidential candidates is no malapropisms, no dyslexia, no gaffes, no speech disorders or impediments of any kind.

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's sad, droopy face makes him rather uncharismatic. Is that important? Does Kerry have other positive factors to make up for it? That's where reasonable people can disagree. Let's not be so blinded by partisanism that we can't acknowledge self evident deficiencies.

Re:Neurosmith Babbler

[anethema]

While the world WOULD be better if everyone spoke the same language..thats not the way the world IS.

So since the world is extreamly multilingual, its better for people to be multilingual.

Re:How about children with two native languages?

[pjay_dml]

Thank you for pointing out that this is a Urban Myth!!!!

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!