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How babies and young children learn to understand language
- smeej 2y ago> Just think how you pronounce the syllable ham when referring to a piece of meat and when talking about a fury animal—a long ham and a short ham-ster. Hang on. Y'all pronounce these differently? I've lived in four U.S. regions and have a pretty generic middle-American accent and I'm having trouble even thinking what the distinction might be.
- koolba 2y ago> Y'all … thinning … Kind of gave it away there.
- smeej 2y agoI edited the 2nd one because it was an actual typo, but ironically the American south is not one of the regions where I've lived. I just find "y'all" clearer than any of its alternatives!
- EgregiousCube 2y agoAuthor is in England.
- IanCal 2y agoI'm in England and I don't get what they're saying. Edit - ah I see reading the context now, it's not the pronunciation but the speed. Hamster has a very fast ham sound
- Sharlin 2y agoSpeed (or more accurately, length) is a part of pronunciation. English speakers don't often think about vowel length because it has no semantic significance like in some other languages, but there's still some phonemic variation, depending on one's dialect.
- wk_end 2y agoCanadian (Toronto) English speaker, although I’ve lived in the US (NYC and Seattle) for a while and it probably rubbed off on me. To me they sound pretty much same if you’re very consciously saying the words as units, in isolation, “trying to pronounce them”. If I say them a little more casually, though, the sounds that come out of my mouth are a little bit closer to “haam” and “hmster” - the vowel sound definitely gets emphasized in the former case and clipped almost entirely in the latter case. It’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re saying a word “properly” unless you’re very very conscious of the sounds you’re producing. As a Canadian, I know this - the stereotype Americans have of the Canadian accent is exaggerated, and it’s much stronger in rural areas, to the extent that I didn’t really think I sounded any different to the Americans in TV or movies. But Americans could still pretty quickly tell I was Canadian when I moved down there. The word “about” is one of the canonical tells, and although I don’t say “aboot” or anything, I learned that I do really say it in an accented way. It wouldn’t be apparent if you just asked me to pronounce the word, but in a sentence my mouth would gloss over the vowels, saying something more like “abut”.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt's hard to really evaluate in isolation, but if I put them in sentences I slur them about the same.
- smeej 2y agoI tested them out loud in the context of sentences: "Can I get some ham on that sandwich?" and "Did you get your kid a hamster?" and the "ham" part still sounds exactly the same to me. It could definitely be an accent or something that I just happen not to have heard much. It just surprised me that I couldn't think of what difference the author was thinking there might be.
- chefandy 2y agoI pronounce the vowels in Mary, marry, and merry differently— like mail, marathon, and merit– but apparently that's not true in many places in the US. My regional accent is pretty mild, but I did grow up in a famously heavily accented area.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoAustralian English is supposed to have phonemic vowel length, such that "can" (the container) and "can" (the auxiliary verb) are pronounced differently.
- troad 2y agoAustralian English indeed has phonemic vowel length. For the average speaker, the only distinction between 'but' and 'Bart' is length.
- o11c 2y agoHm, is it saying "hamster" is /æ/ whereas "ham" is /æː/? I can't actually find a source that uses IPA yet bothers with vowel length right now ... Even in dialects where it is not traditionally transcribed (such as American - partly because long vowels are most common in place of a disappearing /r/), usually there is in fact an audible difference when you aren't thinking about it. This is part of why computer speech always used to sound so terrible. The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable even in accents where /t/ is pronounced like /d/ in this context. Note that this is orthogonal to stress (since both syllables are stressed in this example), and also orthogonal to the badly-named "long vowel, short vowel" taught in school (which is actually for completely different vowel sounds and which omits several other vowel sounds).
- smeej 2y agoNow you're making me wonder if I just don't make enough distinctions in my speech or something, at least when it comes to the short A sound. If I speak these sentences out loud, the words sound exactly the same to me: "That doesn't matter at all." "He was madder than hell." Incidentally I'd say both A's here also sound just like my A's in ham and hamster! It's a very pinched sound, almost nasally. My choir director has had to train it out of us by exaggerating it and making it sound even more ridiculous because it has no place in singing.
- o11c 2y agoI mean, everything is dialect-specific, and there is a lot of variation between dialects around /æ/ in particular (trap-bath, bad-lad, Mary-marry-merry, and the whole mess of /æ/-raising/tensing - is ban-back an example that's always split?). But I'd still say it'd be interesting to record your voice and check the actual timings even if you can't consciously hear the length. Assuming you can actually practice running speech while thinking about it, of course.
- skeledrew 2y agoSign of the quintessential American. For me, a Jamaican, "madder" and "matter" are very distinct. And I don't think I'll ever get how a "t" becomes a "d".
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- Anotheroneagain 2y agoI'm an ESL, mind you but I think the vowel gets pretty cramped with similar short vowels (hem-ham-hum) so the tendency is to make it more different. It drifted away in general in American English, but the vowel in "air" stands in the way in non-rhotic accents, so the change is much more random and word specific.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoIt's good that they mentioned babies hearing in the womb. I've known many mothers that read to or play music for their babies. They say they feel them respond to some things, too, where they seem to sense their surroundings. I'm just reporting what they told me since I haven't studied the literature on this stuff. One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training. I feel that gives a false impression. Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on. The babies are soaking up the world on their own using one set of mechanisms. They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that. Even when not training, much of the content they see and hear is presented in a structured way that helps connect ideas. For instance, listening to the radio or TV with their parents would let them hear a lot of structured speech. Babies are highly trained. They might also do the statistical learning. They're a mix of the two.
- technothrasher 2y ago> Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on. They do, but this training is not necessary for a child to acquire language. Idioglossia (private languages between two people) is an extreme example, but also the process of a pidgin becoming a creole, where the younger generation of a pidgin speaking population fills in the missing details to create a more complete language, even without ever being exposed to such a language.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoThat’s interesting. Thanks for the examples. Are there any places where people post such real-world observations of unsupervised, language learning?
- sc90 2y agoPlay this, by your stomach, let my words massage it and rub it - Nas
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoWhat a silly question to ask. They learn by training on the entire web, hiding one word at a time. /s
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- foobarqux 2y agoChomsky describes why the word identification method described in the article can’t work in English (though a more elaborate method is one of the few successes he knows in applying statistical methods to language): https://youtu.be/92GOS1VIGxY https://youtu.be/92GOS1VIGxY The arguments against universal grammar are no good either: For example even though children may hear lots of examples it isn’t nearly enough to derive a hierarchical grammar. It also doesn’t explain why language is hierarchical (just like it doesn’t explain why we can’t speak and hear like a modem)
- thfuran 2y agoMeaning what, at a few kilobaud?
- new299 2y agoAnyone have a link to the work he cites?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- foldr 2y agoI haven't watched the video, but probably a reference to this and subsequent work along the same lines: https://aclanthology.org/W04-1307.pdf https://aclanthology.org/W04-1307.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/papers/quick.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/papers/quick.pdf https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Yang2004_AcqData_UGStatisticsOrBoth.pdf https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Yang20...
- stared 2y agoOnce you go beyond Markov chains and into vector models (Transformers or even LSTMs), next —-token-- syllable prediction can capture grammar.
- foldr 2y agoThat some aspects of grammar can be captured by statistical analysis was never really in dispute. The OP is slightly confused about the hierarchy part. Chomsky never said that you couldn't discover by statistical analysis that languages have a hierarchical structure. He rather said that a baby, based on the data it has available, would not be able to determine statistically that certain rules of grammar are defined over this structure rather than over the linear sequence of words.
- pcloadletter_ 2y agoI gave up trying to read this after closing the 3rd popup
- MichaelRo 2y ago[flagged]
- alexey-salmin 2y ago> Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alone their meaning. My experience learning French basically. I'd say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.
- konschubert 2y agoMy strategy is to keep listening to the same recording on repeat. 1000 times if needed. It is good if it is a high-quality recording. After a while, my brain starts picking out the word.s
- j_bum 2y agoThis has always been my struggle with French as well. I have never quite able to crack the aural/listening component of the language. How did you overcome the “wall”?
- alexey-salmin 2y agoIt clicked after a year of practice, the change was quick and noticeable. I started learning after moving to France and it helps a great deal even though at work it's English. Not sure how long it would take if I was learning it elsewhere.
- yurishimo 2y agoIt definitely takes longer if you don't live in an environment where it's spoken. Before I moved to NL from the US, I did duolingo every day for 3 months (from the time I accepted the offer to moving) and by the time I got on the plane, I had moved from the beginner module to the intermediate one. After landing and getting settled, I ventured out to really test my skills at the local supermarket and I was completely and utterly useless. Perhaps the only thing I could recognize was the total at the end that I needed to pay. We take for granted regional dialects when speaking our own language and in some languages, dialects can be a huge component of the language. Being able to just go outside and sit on a bench and listen to people speak in the language you want to learn is a huge advantage. Every day, you will passively pick up some words from the context of passers-by. You'll also start to subconsciously figure out what words are "common" in a different way that the lists of "1000 most common words in X langauge" can convey. You also learn how to put them together in context and how some words travel together within a certain context. If I was tasked with learning a language abroad, I would spend 2-4 hours a day consuming native content and make it a priority to speak with a coach online 1-2 times a week, trying to work my way up to holding a conversation for an hour straight. After living here for almost 2 years now, I can just barely get to 1 hour when speaking to my boss (super grateful btw!) but I'm really drained mentally by the end of it. With each meeting it gets easier though and now I can somewhat even make out the local dialect. Learning a language is a numbers game and the reason we often attribute superior language learning skills to kids is simply due to the fact that they have so much free time to listen, absorb, speak, and make mistakes without people judging them because they're kids. I'm fully convinced that adults can learn just as fast or faster, but our own egos often get in the way to putting in the work to learn.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoThe article starts getting good in the last 2 paragraphs, explaining the actual science of observed transitional probabilities, then it suddenly stops. Its almost as if the writer ran out of coffee, or his scientific mind went on strike. What was that ?
- magic_hamster 2y agoIt's a book ad.
- epcoa 2y agoIt seems like this an excerpt from a book? But it also stops after saying “article continues below” (at least on mobile)
- tgv 2y agoSo this bit is just plain wrong > For this the infants were presented with words and non-words and found to have longer listening time for the nonwords. This indicated they had already become familiar with the words by listening to the continuous sequence of syllables within which they had been embedded. The only way that could have happened was by monitoring the TPs between syllables—the infants were capable of statistical learning. First, "longer listening time" doesn't mean that they identified syllables. Second, it's a group effect, not individual, and the differences are small. It's NHST, and thus their p < 0.04 and p < 0.03 means very little. Third, two minutes of speech shouldn't be able to affect the underlying speech recognition. It's too fast. If someone talks some unknown language to you for two minutes, you still don't have a clue. Fourth, the task was extremely artificial. This is a common pattern in cognitive psychology. Small effects, artificial tasks, ignoring other explanations, and then making a grand claim. I'm not denying that the babies, as a group, may have reacted differently to strings of phonenemes not in the training data, but I do deny that this is sufficient evidence for anything.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoYeh, but it came as a surprise so it must be true. Besides, I get this strong vibe that there is a substantial faction in linguistics that is hell-bent on proving that infants learn language statistically, which I think has everything to do with "proving Chomsky wrong" (note the bit in the article about dismissing arguments for universal grammar in chapter 3 of the advertised book). I reckon that has to do with Chomsky's style of arguing that can rub people the very wrong way and seems to have. Depending on whom you ask, either Chomsky has been comprehensively debunked and nobody in linguistics listens to him any more (that's the statistical learning people) or, well, he hasn't and his theories are still valid (his friends). In any case, all this partisanship can only hurt anyone who really wants to get to the bottom of things and understand how language works. And the recent grandiose claims from AI researchers are certainly not helping, either.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoI believe it doesn't start with an explicit attempt to identify words, but from the attempt to compress the sound into fewest meaningful dimensions, and the words naturally result from it. It's a low level process that creates these words, as well as the apparent boundaries.
- isolli 2y agoI learnt German at the age of 25. I distinctly remember the first time I was exposed to it (before learning it), it sounded like water gently flowing down a creek. Then I learnt the basics, and my brain started to catch on to patterns. However, I had to go through the written form to learn properly. I found it hard to parse and remember words when I was only hearing them. Unlike young children, obviously.
- yurishimo 2y agoI think this is a common misconception. Children also find it difficult, but they have a decade to figure it out while adults usually only give themselves a few years. Even at the end of that decade, many children still have problems reading and writing well into adulthood. As adults, we can learn so much faster than kids precisely because we already know how to read and write conceptually. If you can read effortlessly in your native language, you will not be satisfied with your progress in another language until you can read at the same level. What often holds adults back is embarrassment and how that affects our ego. If we could let go and just engage without overthinking it, adults absolutely could pick up languages much faster than kids.
- samus 2y agoChildren also have no choice than to be immersed around the clock. And they have very patient teachers who are elated about every new word they master and who will stubbornly correct them if they get something wrong. Most adult learners can't do full immersion or underestimate its importance and don't commit even if they get the opportunity.
- samvher 2y agoMy impression is mostly the same, but to add to the point about embarassment, native speakers will often not correct adults making mistakes in their language (and avoid showing that a mistake was made) while the same person would correct a mistake for a child. Children also get exposed to much simpler language and get to learn a language more bottom up. Also somehow my impression is that pronunciation/accent really is harder to adopt as an adult than as a child.
- keiferski 2y agoDoes anyone here have direct experience raising multilingual kids? Specifically the situation where one partner speaks English natively and the other speaks two languages natively? For sake of example, let's say they're German and Spanish. (And you want the child to learn all three natively.) My plan is to divide the languages by person and place: - always talk to Parent 1 in English, no matter the location - talk to Parent 2 in Spanish at home and German when outside the home, adhering strictly to this location-based method. The extended family mostly speaks Spanish, which makes the "home" association stronger. This seems easier to me than dividing the languages by time (only speak Spanish on M/W/F, German on Tu/Th/Sat) or other divisions, but I'm open to any suggestions.
- yurishimo 2y agoI think this should work well though I might try and flip the Home language every few years since you want them to be tri-lingual. I don't have any kids yet, but my plan is to speak the less common language where we live at home and then the other language out in the world. That seems to be the approach many friends have taken as well to good effect. Assuming these languages are actually English, Spanish and German, I would find a local club in the minority language and make some local friends where you can speak that language and your kid can come along for the ride.
- alex_duf 2y agoMy SO and I were raised respectively in the UK and France. We both speak fluent French and English. Our plan has been: we each speak our mother-tongue (French for me, English for her), and see what happens. My first child understands english perfectly, but replies in French, and my second is too young yet to say any word, but she understands both languages. Now we've moved to France and found ourselves speaking more and more in French to each other, and -unfortunately- our household is now speaking mostly French rather than keeping English in the mix. But this makes me think maybe we should all speak English at home now that French is acquired by my eldest... not sure!
- samus 2y agoI think a lot also depends on whether the kids are in school or daycare already. Those will take care of advancing one of the languages. I'd say in your situation it doesn't really matter as long as the skills in English are maintained - should be easy enough nowadays.
- moi2388 2y agoMakes sense, perhaps this is also why nursery rhymes chop up words into syllables following the melody.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoWords beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses. Statistical learning --and there are studies about this-- is also obvious when multi-lingual kids make up words that do not exists. They'll use words from one of the language they know to come up with words (or words beginning / ending) in another language. These words, statistically, could make sense. And they'll pronounce them "properly". Yet they don't exist. So it's not just the words: it's the pronunciation too. As the father of a fully bilingual kid (french / english) that was fascinating to watch.
- andruby 2y agoThank you for this. My kids are bilingual in Dutch / English and often make up such words. I like that they'll use words from different languages in the same sentence. School disagrees though. I've once heard someone say that bilingually raised people have a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic, although I really doubt that has any major influence.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoI have one good reason for not doing that, the main reason for language is communication, if you mix two languages, the other person needs to know two languages to understand you, instead of 1,so we try to stick to one, chosen based on context
- bunderbunder 2y ago> Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses. I'm pretty sure that years ago I read in a textbook somewhere that the effect size for this kind of thing is very small relative to other "parent talk" behaviors like exaggerated intonation? (But I also wouldn't be surprised if that was just the author's take and not at all a settled matter.)
- somelamer567 2y ago
- HumblyTossed 2y agoTip for parents - teach your babies Sign Language. They can communicate with you much earlier than they can learn to talk clearly. So much easier when a baby can tell you they're all done or want more than to have to figure that out without communication.
- throwaway173738 2y agoBabies absolutely will still communicate by utterance, gaze, reach, and body language what they want. My son has a particular cry that means either that he wants food, wants to comfort nurse, or wants water. When we hear that my wife and I can just present those three things one by one and he’ll select what he wants. Don’t feel like you have to follow this advice.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago> Babies absolutely will still communicate by utterance, gaze, reach, and body language what they want. Oh, I totally get that. But SL makes it that much easier. > Don’t feel like you have to follow this advice. I wasn't commanding anyone to do something. Good Grief.
- lolinder 2y agoCertainly no one should feel obligated to follow anyone's advice! There's too much contradictory parenting advice going around to be able to follow it all. That said, there's a marked difference between the kinds of assymetrical communication that you're describing and baby sign language. We've done sign with each of our three children and it's remarkable to watch them pick it up—they clearly understand that these hand gestures are words that carry specific meaning and get a lot of delight out of learning and applying them correctly and being mimicked and understood. The language center of the brain clearly develops much faster than the parts responsible for controlling the tongue, and sign gives them a great outlet for that language. Also, you don't have to do anything complicated to give them just a little bit of sign, so unlike a lot of parenting advice it's not difficult to try out. Just say a word while making a sign (ASL if you want but we'll sometimes just make up one on the spot) and then give them the thing or do the thing. "More", "water", "milk", "diaper", "good night", "up"—just pick one and try it! Once you start and see their delight it's hard to stop.
- nop_slide 2y agoRelated, but I'm currently reading "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain", it's fascinating!
- fhe 2y ago> When we write, we leave spaces between words. Readingwordswithoutsuchspacesisdifficult. immediately losing credibility because quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters. In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations.
- posterboy 2y agoThe characters aren't connected so the brush is lifted and a space left behind. Of course this also goes for the space between signs of a compound word, but this also holds for "compound word", which is itself a compound word. Also they had \n = EoL alright. Negative spaces are so important in *-graphy
- csa 2y agoAgree with your main sentiment. For accuracy: > quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters. Correct with Japanese and Chinese. Modern Korean (few or no hanzi/chinese characters) does use spaces. > In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations. Eh… ok, sure, I guess. Punctuation was formalized in the 20th century, yes. There are also lexical markers than can be (and often were) used to mark the beginning or end of certain ideas. While not punctuation, these characters serve a similar purpose in delineating linguistic chunks. The following page gives some simple examples: https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/09/how-china-adopted-western-punctuation/ https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/09/how-china-adopted-...
- blackbrokkoli 2y agoDon't even have to look that far. Scriptio Continua, writing without spaces, was all the rage in Greek and Latin, and the idea of using all those fancy separators like spaces and full stops only caught on in Europe from 800-1400. [0] [0] Wiki Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
- ErigmolCt 2y agoI've always been curious whether learning a second language from childhood has a positive or negative impact on a child's development.