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].
grammar (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
The Real Question (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Good, but what about sign language? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:grammar (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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 tend to make sounds that aren't native to the spoken language around them, such as the uvular fricatives, which don't exist in English.
The other thinks that this very early babbling is attempting to speak, like what you've said.
While I agree with this once the child has learned to use their vocal cords and are actually making attempts to communicate, I believe that the first few bits of babbling and such are most likely the child attempting to gain control over his/her body.
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:1, Interesting)
The many reason for it being different to learn a different language is that it involves learning a greater or lesser different way of viewing the world. To take a trivial example: I think it's Russian which doesn't distinguish green and blue in its focal colours (ie the ones little kiddies learn first). That's a different way of carving up your experience of the world. Now try learning an ergative and accusative language (like Basque) instead of a nominative-accusative language (most Indo-European languages). There, subjects of intransitive verbs have the same case marking as objects of transitive verbs. It's a different way of thinking. Languages which are more closely related genetically are more likely to be similar and therefore easier to to learn, but even so few people attain native-like fluency.
Second reason is that babies' short attentional spans may aid their learning. Simulations have been done on simple recurrent networks which showed that when the network was trained on whole sentences it couldn't learn word order well. When, however, it was altered such that at first it only got short stretches of speech (as if it had a short memory or attention span) and that then gradually increased, it learned word order very well indeed. Adults may just be too smart to learn other languages like that so the data won't be applicable. (I think Jeff Elaman did this work.)
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.
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.
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: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?
Hmmm Piaget? (Score:2, Interesting)
A more in-vogue theory was expressed by Noam Chomsky in the 1970s asserting the existence of a LAD (language acquisition device), a certain type of biological programming that causes children to acquire a language. Notice the word 'acquire,' in opposition to the word 'learn'. Language learning is what you do in middle school, and it's a lot harder; at that point, according to the theory, the language acquisition device has been for the most part deactivated.
This explains quite a few things, such as why certain feral children are absolutely unable to acquire a language and use it the way other neurologically normal human beings do, and why learning a second language is so much more difficult than 'learning' a first (you'll not this is not the same with things like operating systems or other topics of study) -- because the first was not learned. This also explains why, after the first non-native language is learned, language learning becomes progressively easier, as one would expect.
I suggest, for those interested, the following books, in order of preference:
Or, for a more broad view of linguistics as a whole (again in order of preference):
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?
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:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I think babies learn everything better than adu (Score:0, Interesting)
Unless a language is actively used it will be forgotten by the average person. My grandfather came over on the boat when he was 8 and barely remembers is native tongue
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.
*sigh*
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 pitch of my voice because it was high I guess or something (I would have been 2-3 years old, so I don't remember too much and it wasn't done at the schools)). By the time I hit 9-10 years or so it went from learning and practicing to just practicing.
/BACKGROUND
When I was in kindergarden (about 5 years old) the other students could understand me and would "translate" for the teacher, who had a hard time understanding me. When I was at home my sister (about 7 years older then me) understood what I was saying better than my parents.
Programming Languages (Score:3, Interesting)
What we REALLY need to do... (Score:0, Interesting)
Children have a tremendous learning advantage in that they have a great deal more neurons working on the problem than adults do. Sometime around three years old the rate of neurogenesis drops off (not to zero, but to a level where humans perpetually operate with an ongoing net loss).
Imagine having the emotional and intellectual maturity of an adult combined with the tremendous learning aptitude of a child...and being able to produce this state in anyone.
That would make me happy.
Re:Maybe that explains... (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is a long-winded way of saying that we still use thou - we just spell it 'you'. And we still use ye, we just spell it 'the'. (Not to be confused with 'thee'.)
None of this explains the word 'thy', however.
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?
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 slow things down.
I'm curious about how you taught your son. My wife speaks only Chinese to the kids, and I speak only English. They learn Mama's language and Baba's language, and when they're little, it really bothers them to speak Mama's language to me, or vise versa.
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: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:Don't believe it... (Score:1, Interesting)
Ten new words every day.
Back in school, when someone was explicitly trying to teach me words, we had like 10 vocab words per week.
She gave at talk at SFN (Score:2, Interesting)
Not everybody thinks in language regardless... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (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 while the kids had aquired the neccessary vocabulary during that year to fully describe the game, most kids would not use any of the "new" words in their description. Instead they would use only the vocabulary they had at the point they learned the game.
The article concluded that this indicated that memory is formed using the language you know at the time. Which my dad found interesting. He used to teach Norwegian to refugees. In his experience, refugees who only received training in Norwegian and not in their native language tended to lose their native language and if that happened, they also had problems recollecting things that had happened before they arrived.
As for how one thinks without language. I don't think I could convey the feeling of my girlfriends hands running gently down my back to someone who had never expeirenced it, in a way that made him able to truly imagine how it would be like. Yet I have no problems thinking about it. I guess it would be somewhat similar.
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.
Re:The article states that babies learn the same w (Score:2, Interesting)
What I mean is:
1) If you talk to them a lot (as persons not just baby talk), they will understand everything people is talking around them faster and better. Multiples laguages spoken at them will do help them develop this faster.
2) The time when they will start talking is NOT dependant of the time they take to learn and understand the language. It's a physiological thing. Some kids develop all the necessary organs required for talk sooner than the rest, some may never develop them well (and they should require therapy).
Re:I'm a first-time pop with a 2 month old (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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, the infant grammar is a subset of an adult grammar as evidenced by the numerous congugation errors most young children make. They probably learn enough to get started using words, then build a vocabulary while learning the more complex grammar rules.
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:How about children with two native languages? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know of a baby whose mom listened to trance/techno in her car during her pregnancy. After delivery, whenever trance or fast music is played around her, she kicks, smiles, and wiggles about.
So, it seems to me that if MUSIC can do this to entertain a post-delivery baby who heard loud, rhythmic, energizing music as a fetus, then it is very likely there is more credence than many will admit that audio tapes played on a mothers womb can impart knowledge, sound patterns, and higher skills to a newborn and increase that infant's competitiveness or intelligence through its life.
I suspect it even works for adults. I knew some Navy radiomen who were in IMCO school and these guys SLEPT with dit-dah-dee-dee-dahh-dahh- in their ears. I know, because I saw it on my rover/fire-watch duties. It was funny, seeing these bodies asleep, with headphones attached, and observing "dee-dee-dit-dahh.... a, b, c... x... " in the air. I am sure, though, that even if they didn't correlate the letters with the dots and dashes, their brains were at least mapping the audible patterns. Just as we consciously play foreign language tapes and watch foreign language shows to attune our brains to the speed, pitch, and intonations of foreign languages, infants do the same in the womb and in daily life when being doted with attention.
As for "multiple languages" being spoken in the home, I think that is not the only factor. It's the number of PEOPLE in the home doting and reinforcing attention and play with the toddlers. Happier, engaged, and read-to toddlers who are provided structured, intelligence-conveying TV shows are more likely to be very MUCH more intelligent than a toddler or child who is ignored, or only baby-talked. A two-year-old I knew had already formed in her mind and spoke by age 3 or so that "gay" people "are people, too, just a little different, but still people". I imagine such a child will have a fairly high IQ score that does more good for humanity than the hi-IQ types who care more about power and money.
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 rather than just rout memorization of patterns.
Of course, the cool thing was that the Japanese teacher was saying, (with a very bad Japanese accent) "It's very hard for Americans to pronounce the tsu syllable." Then she looks at me, and I'm like "what? tsu. Christ, in German they have ts starting more phomenes than just u"
I also started learning Esperanto at around age 15 or 16, and basicly, I just picked up learning languages as a hobby. Now, I can run through languages learning the basics and perhaps a bit more in just a few weeks. If they're very related to a language I already know well, then even shorter. (I learned Swedish to a conversational level in about a week, to a month.)
Re:Babies are like sponges (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, language acquisition was found to be independent of ability to learn other skills, such as arithmetic. Language seems to be uniquely affected by a critical period.
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 sylables.
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about children with two native languages? (Score:2, Interesting)
After her second stroke she lost most of her memory of the last 20 or so years. It doesn't come back at all and her "reset" is about 5 minutes, which makes conversation impossible.
Now when I visit her she thinks I'm my dad and I learn interesting things about his childhood. She seems to want to constantly punish me for one thing or another. Some of which are: crashing a homemade snowmobile through the upstairs window. apparently he was trying to jump the roof, shaving the dog, and borrowing the car and leaving it around a tree. Some of the things are interesting so I guess I make good out of a bad situation.