3 ms·
Look up the "conditioned head turn procedure" as a means of testing phonetic perception in infants. It is pretty well established that infants have a much great
by 3131s 7y ago
Look up the "conditioned head turn procedure" as a means of testing phonetic perception in infants. It is pretty well established that infants have a much greater ability to distinguish phonemes compared to adults.
What you said is true the other way around too. Infants can't look something up in a dictionary, or ask a bilingual person to clarify the finer points of a word or phrase in a language they already know. Infants aren't just learning the language but also the concepts behind the language, which would seem to make what they're doing more exceptional than adult language learning.
- gerbilly 7y ago> Infants aren't just learning the language but also the concepts behind the language Some people say that children don't just learn grammar, but that they sometimes also create the grammar rules of emerging languages through a process called creolization.
- quadrangle 7y agoI don't doubt those differences, but as someone with a music background and an awareness of sound (and having seen others pick up accents and phonemes much less readily than myself), I still see so much we can't control for. Maybe nobody has succeeded at getting adults as close as they can get to the infant state. How do we know the difference between adults being incapable of hearing phonemes similarly to infants versus failure to express to the adults what state they need to be in to listen? Obviously, most adults are filled with thoughts and cultural interpretations of any psychological study context and don't have the same open mind as an infant. The differences are stark in practice between adult and infant learning and behavior. But what are the underlying factors that create the distinctions? I think we have very little practical capacity to tease them apart.