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I am confused at this: the window that people speak about is largely one of having any language. Aissam seems to have a language, albeit an idiomatic one that w

I am confused at this: the window that people speak about is largely one of having any language. Aissam seems to have a language, albeit an idiomatic one that was developed to communicate with parents. If so, he has developed the speech pathways, even if any given language will be one of second language acquisition. Now there may be another reason, but the article is either missing context or the question was not expressed in a way where the doctor answered in a way that follows the science around the critical language period, as I understand it (at least)

SamBam 3y ago
Yeah, this seems confusing. Obviously his brain has a solid understanding of language, and he even recently learned a new language (Spanish Sign Language) so learning another language should be possible. It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his. We've learned a lot from people who have received cochlear implants at different ages. Earlier implantation is strongly associated with functional spoken language use and fluent speech. There's a big benefit before age 5; a large proportion of those implanted before 24 months basically have normal language skills, while few after age 5 ever fully "catch up." edit: Here's a study of prelingually deafened adult outcomes with CIs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720870/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720870/ All of those studied had acquired spoken language before implantation and had some degree of effective hearing earlier in life, so were not fully deafened before the language acquisition window. The implants provide an improvement of quality of life but do not allow most of even this population to e.g. understand spoken language on TV without subtitles.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Listening to TV conversations is a high bar. In conversations people can ask for clarification or to slow down etc. Which explains: Before implantation, 7% of the patients were able to have telephone conversations. vs After implantation, 60% of patients are able to have telephone conversations. Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Still, pay attention to context. This was people who were successfully using hearing aids and oral language before implantation. Even in this subpopulation, they did not do nearly as well as children do, even though this subpopulation was less deafened than most deaf children. > Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants. We do have enough series to know that 5 year olds receiving treatment have (on average) significantly worse outcomes than 18-24mos.
      - Retric 3y ago
        For the timescales we have tested there’s significant differences, and in terms of quality of life it’s clear early intervention is a significant benefit. However, slower adaptation isn’t zero adaptation. The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question.
        mlyle 3y ago
        > The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question. Slower development usually means a lower plateau, and I think we pretty much have to assume as such (and can be prepared to be pleasantly surprised). Else, we get to wishful thinking: older people on older devices developed more slowly and plateaued at a lesser value of hearing. Now, we have implanted older people on newer devices, and they're developing more slowly, but hey, maybe they'll eventually develop fully normal hearing.
- graphe 3y ago
  I recall that they trained a part of an insect's head like the nasal passage and it was able to be used for language better than the model at that time chatGPT2. So there's something innate in nature that can learn human languages.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Can you find that study?
    - graphe 3y ago
      Took me a few hours but it was fascinating. I couldn't find it again easily. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brain-network-hacked-for-language-processing https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brai... https://oadoi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430 https://oadoi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430
      - SamBam 3y ago
        Cool, and thanks for search! I think you may have slightly over-sold the study, though -- or at least what you remembered from it. My reading of the first study was that they took a simulated version of a relatively large (2000 node) neutral network that makes up part of a fruitfly brain, and were able to do standard neutral network training on it to do some language prediction. I'm not sure that this says anything about fruitfly noses being wired for language though. I expect that they could have taken that same simulated architecture and trained it to do anything that regular neutral networks could do -- detect faces, make stock market predictions, play a (poor) game of Go, or learn a homeowner's thermostat patterns. I think it's just more a statement about the power of neutral networks in general.
        graphe 3y ago
        I did misremember, it seems they used a network of algorithms based on how flies use 2000 neurons and the original article I read it from a while ago may have oversold it. The fact it was able to predict well is them looking for inspiration in insects, and that they'll be using more insect inspired behavior.
dbcurtis 3y ago
Language development starts earlier than most people think. Babies babble with all the sounds the human vocal tract can make, but by 6 months they are only babbling with the sounds of the language in their household. Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. About 45 years ago I heard Chomsky speak on the idea that the human brain is wired to learn a grammar as much as a bird is wired for birdsong. So learning some grammar is innate, but the particulars are up to environment. Source: 1/2 a century ago I was a bit of a developmental linguistics nerd. Disclaimer: But many memories have faded.
- omeid2 3y ago
  > Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. This is only true if the second language has sounds that you don't have in your first language.
  - dbcurtis 3y ago
    Can you name a language pair where that works? I can’t think of one.
    - iopq 3y ago
      If your native language is Ukrainian, when you learn Russian you don't get more phonemes, unless you count slightly different mouth positions of vowels.
    - dataflow 3y ago
      https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633
  - mrtree 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Tor3 3y ago
foobiekr 3y ago
Audio processing is a bit light sight processing - once you miss the critical development period, which is not directly related to the "critical period" for language learning, you will never actually develop them. People can develop something, for example people who had oxygen-destroyed corneas causing blindness who later got corneal transplants, but it will never be vision as you know it.
- Tor3 3y ago
  Search "kitten vertical lines experiment" on the Famous Search Engine. Kittens not allowed to see horizontal lines for the first few months would never be able to see horizontal lines, ever. It's at least somewhat like that with humans too. Ever wondered why some kids are wearing a patch over one eye? If the child needs glasses but (in particular) when they didn't get proper correction early on then they may have double vision, and what the brain does is to block one eye. That eye, despite "seeing", will lose the paths in the brain necessary for seeing well. The patch forces the brain to start using the eye again. This happened to me - the doctor told my father "no need to check this regularly", and after some years one of my eyes had indeed lost resolution. It's still like that. One eye can see very well, the other at much lower resolution. Though I found that even at middle age it was possible to improve that to some extent - not the actual resolution, but the brain's ability to actively use the eye could be improved a little. I would read books with only one eye. Could only read half a page at the beginning. But it's impossible to recover the vision I lost as a child, which was caused by the brain ignoring the eye.
  - wildylion 3y ago
    I have the same however my other eye is fine with regard to resolution - I just need glasses or a contact lens. But yes, the binocular vision is permanently shot (though I get some improvement at times). That's what you get for being an insufferably stubborn kid.
  - branko_d 3y ago
    I have the same situation. The annoying part is that my "untrained" eye is not near-sighted, but my "trained" eye is. I suspect it was different in the childhood (untrained: far-sighted, trained: not far-sighted) and then shifted in the direction of near-sightedness over time.
hoseja 3y ago
The ad-hoc language (generically called "kitchensign" apparently?) might be too primitive.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Maybe the brain's plasticity. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that brain nerve cells wonder around and do their thing based on incoming stimuli when the child develops. During very early age a lot of things can be corrected by the brain if something goes sideways, thanks to the plasticity of these nerve cells, but after a while, when the nerve cells "settle" and "conquer their role", they cannot change anymore.
chriskanan 3y ago
Sensory and motor systems have critical or sensitive periods early in life and then the neural network is pruned and the critical period closes. This is why second language acquisition is much easier at younger ages. There are some drugs that may reopen the critical period although not much can be done about the pruning. So basically all the early neural circuits for interpreting sounds are not organized correctly and it's unclear if they can be post critical period.
tibbydudeza 3y ago
There was very sad case of an abused girl named "Genie" who was never spoken to by her parents - kept in a locked room as a toddler and she was rescued at age 13 and made a ward of the state but never learned the ability to speak despite best efforts of linguists and therapy. It is if the basics of language and fine motor control required of the vocal cords/tongue/mouth in her brain was not primed and that ability was forever gone.

SamBam 3y ago

Yeah, this seems confusing. Obviously his brain has a solid understanding of language, and he even recently learned a new language (Spanish Sign Language) so learning another language should be possible. It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his.

mlyle 3y ago
> It sounds like the researchers are saying there's something special about learning spoken language. But it seems to me that there can't have been many cases similar to his. We've learned a lot from people who have received cochlear implants at different ages. Earlier implantation is strongly associated with functional spoken language use and fluent speech. There's a big benefit before age 5; a large proportion of those implanted before 24 months basically have normal language skills, while few after age 5 ever fully "catch up." edit: Here's a study of prelingually deafened adult outcomes with CIs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720870/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5720870/ All of those studied had acquired spoken language before implantation and had some degree of effective hearing earlier in life, so were not fully deafened before the language acquisition window. The implants provide an improvement of quality of life but do not allow most of even this population to e.g. understand spoken language on TV without subtitles.
- Retric 3y ago
  Listening to TV conversations is a high bar. In conversations people can ask for clarification or to slow down etc. Which explains: Before implantation, 7% of the patients were able to have telephone conversations. vs After implantation, 60% of patients are able to have telephone conversations. Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Still, pay attention to context. This was people who were successfully using hearing aids and oral language before implantation. Even in this subpopulation, they did not do nearly as well as children do, even though this subpopulation was less deafened than most deaf children. > Also, the technology dramatically improved over time so we don’t have long term data on high quality implants. We do have enough series to know that 5 year olds receiving treatment have (on average) significantly worse outcomes than 18-24mos.
    - Retric 3y ago
      For the timescales we have tested there’s significant differences, and in terms of quality of life it’s clear early intervention is a significant benefit. However, slower adaptation isn’t zero adaptation. The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        > The limits for people implanted at 5 when they are 50 is still an open and IMO interesting question. Slower development usually means a lower plateau, and I think we pretty much have to assume as such (and can be prepared to be pleasantly surprised). Else, we get to wishful thinking: older people on older devices developed more slowly and plateaued at a lesser value of hearing. Now, we have implanted older people on newer devices, and they're developing more slowly, but hey, maybe they'll eventually develop fully normal hearing.
graphe 3y ago
I recall that they trained a part of an insect's head like the nasal passage and it was able to be used for language better than the model at that time chatGPT2. So there's something innate in nature that can learn human languages.
- SamBam 3y ago
  Can you find that study?
  - graphe 3y ago
    Took me a few hours but it was fascinating. I couldn't find it again easily. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brain-network-hacked-for-language-processing https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brai... https://oadoi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430 https://oadoi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430
    - SamBam 3y ago
      Cool, and thanks for search! I think you may have slightly over-sold the study, though -- or at least what you remembered from it. My reading of the first study was that they took a simulated version of a relatively large (2000 node) neutral network that makes up part of a fruitfly brain, and were able to do standard neutral network training on it to do some language prediction. I'm not sure that this says anything about fruitfly noses being wired for language though. I expect that they could have taken that same simulated architecture and trained it to do anything that regular neutral networks could do -- detect faces, make stock market predictions, play a (poor) game of Go, or learn a homeowner's thermostat patterns. I think it's just more a statement about the power of neutral networks in general.
      - graphe 3y ago
        I did misremember, it seems they used a network of algorithms based on how flies use 2000 neurons and the original article I read it from a while ago may have oversold it. The fact it was able to predict well is them looking for inspiration in insects, and that they'll be using more insect inspired behavior.

dbcurtis 3y ago

Language development starts earlier than most people think. Babies babble with all the sounds the human vocal tract can make, but by 6 months they are only babbling with the sounds of the language in their household. Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. About 45 years ago I heard Chomsky speak on the idea that the human brain is wired to learn a grammar as much as a bird is wired for birdsong. So learning some grammar is innate, but the particulars are up to environment. Source: 1/2 a century ago I was a bit of a developmental linguistics nerd. Disclaimer: But many memories have faded.

omeid2 3y ago
> Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. This is only true if the second language has sounds that you don't have in your first language.
- dbcurtis 3y ago
  Can you name a language pair where that works? I can’t think of one.
  - iopq 3y ago
    If your native language is Ukrainian, when you learn Russian you don't get more phonemes, unless you count slightly different mouth positions of vowels.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633
- mrtree 3y ago
  [dead]
- Tor3 3y ago

foobiekr 3y ago

Audio processing is a bit light sight processing - once you miss the critical development period, which is not directly related to the "critical period" for language learning, you will never actually develop them. People can develop something, for example people who had oxygen-destroyed corneas causing blindness who later got corneal transplants, but it will never be vision as you know it.

Tor3 3y ago
Search "kitten vertical lines experiment" on the Famous Search Engine. Kittens not allowed to see horizontal lines for the first few months would never be able to see horizontal lines, ever. It's at least somewhat like that with humans too. Ever wondered why some kids are wearing a patch over one eye? If the child needs glasses but (in particular) when they didn't get proper correction early on then they may have double vision, and what the brain does is to block one eye. That eye, despite "seeing", will lose the paths in the brain necessary for seeing well. The patch forces the brain to start using the eye again. This happened to me - the doctor told my father "no need to check this regularly", and after some years one of my eyes had indeed lost resolution. It's still like that. One eye can see very well, the other at much lower resolution. Though I found that even at middle age it was possible to improve that to some extent - not the actual resolution, but the brain's ability to actively use the eye could be improved a little. I would read books with only one eye. Could only read half a page at the beginning. But it's impossible to recover the vision I lost as a child, which was caused by the brain ignoring the eye.
- wildylion 3y ago
  I have the same however my other eye is fine with regard to resolution - I just need glasses or a contact lens. But yes, the binocular vision is permanently shot (though I get some improvement at times). That's what you get for being an insufferably stubborn kid.
- branko_d 3y ago
  I have the same situation. The annoying part is that my "untrained" eye is not near-sighted, but my "trained" eye is. I suspect it was different in the childhood (untrained: far-sighted, trained: not far-sighted) and then shifted in the direction of near-sightedness over time.

hoseja 3y ago

The ad-hoc language (generically called "kitchensign" apparently?) might be too primitive.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Maybe the brain's plasticity. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that brain nerve cells wonder around and do their thing based on incoming stimuli when the child develops. During very early age a lot of things can be corrected by the brain if something goes sideways, thanks to the plasticity of these nerve cells, but after a while, when the nerve cells "settle" and "conquer their role", they cannot change anymore.

chriskanan 3y ago

Sensory and motor systems have critical or sensitive periods early in life and then the neural network is pruned and the critical period closes. This is why second language acquisition is much easier at younger ages. There are some drugs that may reopen the critical period although not much can be done about the pruning. So basically all the early neural circuits for interpreting sounds are not organized correctly and it's unclear if they can be post critical period.

tibbydudeza 3y ago

There was very sad case of an abused girl named "Genie" who was never spoken to by her parents - kept in a locked room as a toddler and she was rescued at age 13 and made a ward of the state but never learned the ability to speak despite best efforts of linguists and therapy. It is if the basics of language and fine motor control required of the vocal cords/tongue/mouth in her brain was not primed and that ability was forever gone.