Toddlers May Learn Language By Data Mining 213
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Toddlers' brains can effortlessly do what the most powerful computers with the most sophisticated software cannot: learn language simply by hearing it used. A ground-breaking new theory postulates that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining. Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image. After viewing various combinations of words and images, however, the children were surprisingly successful at figuring out which word went with which picture. Yu and Smith say it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what. Yu says if they can identify key factors involved in this form of learning and how it can be manipulated, they might be able to make learning languages easier for children and adults. Understanding children's learning mechanisms could also further machine learning."
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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In "real books", the idea was that you could just place a large pile of books in front of a group of toddlers and they would teach themselves to read.
In "phonics", the basic sound of each syllable is taught first, along with some basic words and pictures (cat, mat, apple, pea, and so on).
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Perhaps call it something like Rosetta stone...
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Yes it's true that children will learn the rules and then apply them, sometimes inappropriately, until they learn the exceptions. I expect that your nieces/nephews who use "ran" have simply heard that word used more often in the right context and have therefore learned this particular irregularity.
My own son gave a classic example some time ago of a sentence showing he was part way through this learning process. I can't for the life of me remember what it was, which is very annoying, but he was using two
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the first sound (aside from crying) that a baby is capable of forming is the sound 'ma', and subsequently 'ma-ma'. Unfortunately, all those mothers who believe their child is referring to them are mistaken, although the term rapidly becomes associated with mother anyway, so it gets to be true after a while.
It should be obvious really, how else would every child ever born (that could vocalise) select the same sound?
I'm less sure about da-da. I know 'da' is another sound that a child can form earlier, but that's all.
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However, although in my language it's papa and I'm currently teaching my son to pronounce it consciously, he started with "dada" earlier than "papa". The plural of "anecdote" is not "data", of course, but it seems that at least for him "dada" was available earlier.
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Babies make a lot of different sounds well before they say 'ma': squealing, gig
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It is interesting to see them pick things up; you spend all day trying to teach them to say a word like "apple" and then you say something like, "Can you bring me the apple?" and they grab the right thing, and do the right action.
I think its interesting how far actual vocalization lags behind the conceptual development, though I suppose tha
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Very interesting. I studied a ton of philosophy of language, back in the day, and I've been hauling out my old books and re-reading them. There is some cool stuff going on there.
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Eventually he abandoned that behaviour and later replaced it with a more sophisticated model. Presumably he had then collected enough data to get a better idea of how our language worked.
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You're right. This is old wine in new bottles. Notice the source: a University of Indiana press release. One wonders how this bit of ho-hum research made its way to Slashdot...
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Sound quite deterministic to me.
You get two images (to a computer these would be like indexes into a database, assuming they used the identical image every time) and you get two pre-recorded words (again, identical every time, so just two indexes).
So, if we give assign images letter index and words numerical ones, we could get:
A, B and 1, 2
C, D and 3, 4
E, F and 5, 6
and then...
A, F and 2, 1
How difficult would it be for a c
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It should even in the second. In fact, that's the primary and most effective mode of learning for the human brain. That's also why formal education sucks.
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Pity the mods missed that comment, pearls before swine I tell ya.
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Surely the experiment was more to do with learning out of context. If anything the experiment is not about context at all. It's about their brains being able to go through huge amounts of data(orders of magnitude more than learning one word at a time) in order to learn words.
We learn from this that toddlers brains are extremely quick at processing data. Probably much
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Buzz-words aside, this is common knowledge. Babies and toddlers can learn as astounding rates at that age. Just talk to them as you would normally and they'll be talking themselves sooner than you can expect. 18 months is p
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who is raised with a single language does not even hear certain sounds in other languages because their brain has long since rejected those sounds as irrelevant 'noise'. The same thing applies to vision, a baby sees every meercat face as different but adults don't (without a lot of practice).
A babies brain actually loses a lot of connectivity between neurons in the first year of life (not so much data minning as connection breaking/forming). In other words we are all programmed by our early environment to exclude irrelevant stimuli, hacking into that 'code' later in life can be extremely difficult.
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It's not that people from a mono-lingual enviroment can't lean to speak a another language, it's that it's much more difficult for them. The further apart the languages the harder it becomes, this is why people from SE Asia, China, Japan, ect have a great deal of dificulty when speaking engrish. They filter out sounds s
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And get off my lawn you jabbering monkey!
under feeling the (Score:4, Funny)
got that?
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Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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I also let her run around the park while her brethren are in various classes. I guess she'll never be president. I do wish I knew Spanish, though - that seems to be a more and more popular language these days in the US.
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm pretty sure that qualifies as child abuse.
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Perl is just child abuse in a way that MicroSoft dream of!
If only schools would teach Vi instead of Emacs *sigh*
Mods: Jay Oh Kay Ee. (Retarded mods: JOKE, as in not flaimbait, more a comment on the MS structured environment presented by most educational establishments).
Silly me, ponies!!!!!!!1111111one!!!1
--
This post written whilst drunk!
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It's child abusers like you that need to be locked up for a long time.
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At least it's not Vogon Poetry...
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Hamlet in C (Score:4, Funny)
It always equates to true, so I guess Shakespeare was onto something.
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I wouldn't advise teaching European languages - they'll be obsolete in a generation. Arabic would be a more worthwhile substitute, as it's spoken over a much larger area, and most European children will speak it in 20 years anyway.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
My GF's nephew grew up in a Spanish-speaking household and was basically fluent at 4. But now, at age 13, he seems to have mostly forgotten it in favor of his dominant language, English. Same thing happened with a GF I had when I was much younger. Kids have a tremendous ability to learn things. But also to utterly forget them.
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ok, but it's also possible that won't happen. There are a lot of people who never really get all the rules of English, despite living in the US their entire lives.
And kids learn from their surroundings. A child who is spoken to as though he or she is an intelligent adult will naturally develop a better vocabulary than a kid who only hears "GODDAMMIT JIMMY! Shut the hell up when Dr. Phil is on TV."
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I have had the plan for a long time to help them with foreign languages as well. Reading your paragraph about this makes me wonder right now if one cannot just turn on, say, a Japanese TV program for children or a simple audio book. You/we might not understand the language, but it might give your child a feeling/foundation for that language (or at least its sounds and pronunciation) which might really help
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Want multilingual kids? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do what my mum did: buy albums of kids songs in foreign languages (in my case only French). When I was about four, I could sing in a perfect French accent. Didn't have a clue what I was saying, but the accent was there. When I started learning French about 8 years later I had no problems. My ear was primed and my mouth was primed, so I could handle the sound system without problems, and it's the sounding like a foreigner/lunatic that frustrates most people when learning languages.
HAL.
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Definitely worth it to teach languages. Learn with your children. Mine spoke Korean before she spoke English (Korean is my t
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My grandfather was an English teacher, my mom never baby talked to me.
I was correcting people's grammar, spelling, and punctuation when I was first able to talk.
Effortless? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Effortless? (Score:4, Insightful)
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My almost two year old is quite expressive - but his 'words' at the moment are single syllables. He quite clearly has a large vocabulary and knows what he means, but I have difficulty working out what he means. For example, on the bus the other day he kept saying "T", "T", "T". I couldn't work it out? Toe? T-shirt? No, I eventually worked out it was Tree. He was pointing to everyone he could see, and there were rather a
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It takes time for a child to learn language. A toddler can get frustrated when parents (or others) don't understand what they want. But the language acquisition process is not hard in the same way as learning is hard for adults. They do not need to conciously do it. It is more instinctive and automatic than if I were to try to learn another language. Furthermore, the problem is not understanding and learning the language - the problem is expressin
Re:Effortless? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending on your definition, most kids would not be considered fluent with their first language until the age of 4 or 5, and then generally still speak it with an accent. I would say that this is not all really any different than an adult. They are actually probably a little slower.
This just in..... (Score:3, Funny)
no scientific content here (Score:5, Informative)
Mining but not for data (Score:5, Funny)
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What did she do with it, bring it back to the dealer?
Taking it a step further. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first phase of the project was to teach these children the sign-alphabet. After this, I'm not sure if they were going to teach the full english or spanish sign-language (seems there's not an international standard for sign-language), but the point is that after a year, the experiment was deemed a failure and abandoned.
Then a couple of years later, reports started trickling out of these deaf-mute children exchanging unintelligible gibberish with their hands. A couple of researchers flew in, and were astonished to discover that these kids, using the sign-alphabet as a starting point, had developed a complete, unique language of their own in just two or three years - the first ever documented report of a fully formed, structured language bursting spontaneously into existence. These children are, of course, now adults in their thirties, still in touch with each other and communicating amongst themselves in the language they invented three decades ago.
And now, for something completely different...
Terrence McKenna, that lovable old psychonaut, postulated an empirical assumption in the eighties and nineties - language was created over many generations, via deep psilocybin trance rituals, of which the whole tribe partook. One by one, abstract concepts emerged in the back and forth play between members of the tribe, led and refereed of course by the shaman.
The Nicaraguan kids have poked serious holes into McKenna's whimsical idea. As it turns out, children can develop fully formed languages almost overnight! And so, with concrete data, a new possibility has arisen - languages burst upon the world from the mouths of children, and never mind the psychedelic substances.
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For some reason the wikipedia article about this has an odd name: http://en.wi [wikipedia.org]
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Before the 1970s, the was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Each deaf child had to make their own way in life, usually aided by a crude system of signs--called a home signing system--developed with their speaking parents. In the 1970s, however, a school for the deaf was founded and children from all over Nicaragua came to it. There was some debate over which sign language was going to be taug
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It's too bad I never get mod points any more, either... I'd probably have modded you up instead of posting this.
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Chapter 7 of Genome by Matt Ridley briefly discusses what happened Nicaragua in connection with the human instinct for languages:
Bickerton's hypothesis has received remarkable support from the study of sign language. In one case, in Nicaragua, special schools for the deaf, established for the first time in the 1980s, led to the invention, de novo, of a whole new language. The schools ta
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language [wikipedia.org]
In unrelated news... (Score:3, Funny)
Multiple languages (Score:5, Interesting)
But I personally believe that the human brain does a hell of a lot more data mining than we give it credit for. There's a damn good reason why things seem clearer after a good night's sleep. The human brain is designed for massively parallel information processing, and we can't possibly handle it all in a conscious processing context. A lot happens behind the scenes. I'm guessing it's going to be quite some time still until we can fully understand the "inner workings" of the human brain.
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Our kids were both born in Viet Nam, but our older one learned to talk there and was initially a monolingual Vietnamese speaker, while our younger one learned to talk in the United States and was initially a monolingual English speaker, who understood some Vietnamese but could not speak it. As the
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While you may not be able to do multiple things at the same time on a conscious level, your brain is in fact performing a hell of a lot at the same time. Take things like walking, talking, seeing etc. There is a huge flow of information going from and to your brain at any time. It's just that you can't perform two tasks at the same time and "know about it" so to speak. :)
Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Interesting)
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Made harder by the fact that the most basic verbs (which tend to be taught first year) in many languages (including English) have a tendency to be the most irregular. Probably because conjugation tends to become more regular for late-arriving words in a language, after rules have been established, while the most basi
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I was wondering this myself before I started Rosetta Stone classes. Here's an example (not translated for simplicity):
They show you 4 pictures:
(1) 2 boys standing on a table, 2 girls in the air a few inches off the table,
(2) all 4 kids standing on the table, but knees bent, arms swung back as if to jump,
(3) 2 boys
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Child language acquisition (Score:4, Interesting)
When children start coming up with overregularizations like "goed" instead of "went" or "playses" in place of "plays," that kind of attempt at applying regular morphological rules to irregular items, is when you might say they are acquiring language via data mining. I.e., they hear a form used often enough that it becomes part of their knowledge about words, to the extent that that form is unconsciously applied even to make words they have certainly never heard in adult speech before.
(Disclaimer:
1. I will graduate this May with a B.A. in linguistics.
2. First language acquisition is not wholly understood as of yet, but suffice it to say that it's more complicated and there are many more factors involved than the article makes it seem.
3. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding what they mean by "data mining.")
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In both cases he seemed to think his version rolled of the tongue better and should be used.
If I have a point it is that the child is to some extent making the language up as they go. As with other parts of their development they test boundaries all the time. If the language they learn is deficient in some way they w
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Baby's first word (Score:2)
Controlling for home language (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya, Steve Martin covered this... (Score:2)
Kids learn to talk by listening to their parents... When you're around him, you talk wrong. So now it's like his first day in school and he raises his hand and says, "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"
Isn't this how Google Translate works? (Score:2)
OhMyGawd (Score:2)
Researchers in Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain uses highly complex statistics to learn language. [...] Assistant professor Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith, professor and chair of the department [...]
(http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6382.html)
I sincerely hope we'll be seeing more and better stuff coming along from these Brain S
Research? (Score:2)
Association, not data mining (Score:2)
i.e. (A, B) => assoc(A, B)++ ---- The ONE MILLION DOLLAR formula!
It doesn't make any difference how many words / objects or other sensory inputs are presented together - just strengthen the associations of all co-present stimuli (this is simply
Somewhat Related Resarch (Score:2)
In short, it stored meta information about objects and
Transitivity (Score:2)
Google uses datamining in their GMail application,
Okay, it's mining (Score:4, Funny)
Every time a car pulls up next to us now he looks at it and says "Dear God!" And the last time his mom had to slam on brakes he giggled and said "What the fuck, huh?" And when she shrieked at him, that was just gasoline on the fire. For the rest of drive home all he could do was giggle and say "What the fuck, Mommy? Mommy? What the fuck, Mommy?"
This is not improving my sex life.
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