People shouldn't wait to start until kids are in kindergarten, Bardutz emphasized.
"They've missed the critical time. The kids need to hear the language starting at before birth," she said. "The earlier the better."
REGINA — Children start to learn language even before they're born, neurolinguist Holly Bardutz is teaching students in her language acquisition class at the University of Regina.
While still in the womb, babies already start to learn language by hearing the rhythm of the language, says Bardutz.
To recreate what it's like in the womb, and what a baby might hear, Bardutz asked her students to spend class time in the university's pool, with their ears under water, listening to people above ground speaking in various languages, including Urdu (which is spoken in India), Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, English, French and Korean.
"What we're looking for is the rhythm of the language," Bardutz explained.
Not only does the rhythm vary depending on the language, but also depending on whether the language is being spoken, sung or read.
"And reading from a textbook is different than reading a Dr. Seuss (book), which has more rhythm," she pointed out.
An unborn child's hearing is fully developed by 36 weeks, Bardutz said. A full-term baby is born at 40 weeks.
"So usually the last three or four weeks while they're in the uterus, they have fully developed hearing," she said.
"And the uterus is a watery substance, so that's why we're coming to the pool," Bardutz explained.
"When babies are born — even at four hours old — right at birth, they can already identify their own language," she said. "They can tell if what they're hearing is English or Chinese. They don't know the language, but they can recognize their own language."
http://www.leaderpost.com/life/class+takes+pool+learn+rhythm+language/4398110/story.html
9.3.11
Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition
Rebecca L. Gómez and LouAnn Gerke
Infant language researchers have begun by examining four aspects of the language learner’s task. The first involves identification of word-like units in speech. The second involves encoding and remembering the order in which words occur in sentences. The third involves generalization of grammatical relations. The last involves learning at the more abstract level of syntactic categories (e.g. determiner, adjective, noun and verb). This fourth sensitivity is at the root of our unique human ability to produce and comprehend novel utterances.
[Sam: The fundamental flaw to this approach is that we are taking an adult approach to understand how infants acquire languages.]
How does our growing understanding of infant learning abilities bear on the highly constrained language learner described in the introduction? We can identify at least three ways.
First, all of the artificial-language-learning studies discussed have examined infants’ sensitivity to linguistic form in the absence of semantic content. In so far as these studies are tapping sensitivities used in real-language acquisition, they challenge many accounts in which language development is driven by a mapping between meaning and form. This is not to say that learners do not ultimately need to map the syntactic forms they encode during infancy onto meaning. Obviously they do. However, the fact that infants are able to acquire certain aspects of form prior to acquiring the meaning of these forms changes the nature of the language acquisition problem in a fundamental way.
[Sam: Baby's world of language has no meaning. They are just playing with sounds.]
A second implication of the research on infant artificial language learning concerns the specificity of the constraints on the learner. On many accounts, these constraints have been construed as being language specific, such that for every aspect of language to be acquired, the child is born with a specific constraint or parameter that guides him/her to the correct representation. Data showing that infants can use transitional probabilities to segment grammatical tone sequences contrasts with this view, suggesting that they apply statistical learning to linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli alike.The application of statistical sensitivity to the problem of word segmentation is admittedly far from the constraints discussed by linguistic nativists (involving such language-specific notions as whether or not declarative sentences in a particular language must have an overt subject).
[Sam: Chomsky has over complicated the issue by imposing meaning when baby is just playing with sounds.]
A third implication of both the infant artificial-languagelearning studies reviewed here and the myriad studies of infant language perception preceding them concerns the relevance of children’s early utterances as evidence for theories of language acquisition. One of the key observations of linguistic nativists involves errors that children do not make. As noted earlier, children never erroneously transform a statement like ‘The man who is tall is Sam’ into a question like ‘Is the man who tall is Sam? ’ The lack of such errors, along with logical arguments concerning the poverty of the stimulus, have been taken as evidence that children never consider rules based solely on linear order in sentences. Although researchers have begun to address the question of a how a statistical learner might begin to negotiate impoverished input, it is equally important to note that if the studies of infants’ early linguistic abilities tell us anything, it is that they have become sensitive to many aspects of linguistic form a year or more before they ever begin to produce multiword speech. This is not to say that all of language is acquired by the age of 12 months. However, if infant language-perception studies have one theme, it is in demonstrating the extremely complex (and often contrasting) relationship between aspects of their native language infants and young children have tacitly discerned and those they actually produce. Thus, we must exercise caution in interpreting children’s early utterances as evidence for or against the linguistic representations they do and do not entertain.
[Sam: the research has overlooked the different stages of brain development.]
A final comment is in order. Given the vast differences in artificial grammars and natural language, how do we ensure that the learning observed is representative of language learning in the real world? First, in using this approach it is important to design experiments capturing key linguistic phenomena. If we can isolate a phenomenon of interest experimentally, we can go on to test it using a wide range of manipulations, where, presumably, such manipulations are driven by our knowledge of natural language acquisition. For instance, the finding that 18-month-olds, but not 15-montholds track grammatical dependencies separated by one to three intervening syllables, suggests that we should see the same pattern with an artificial grammar designed to investigate such learning Indeed, studies in our joint laboratories show that we do. Another approach, currently being investigated by Saffran and colleagues, is to test whether the output of statistical learning can be used as input to natural language.
Ultimately, however, as with any scientific endeavor, the proof of this approach will depend on the extent to which it generates new ways of understanding the mechanisms involved in natural language acquisition. Its real promise lies in the precision it affords with respect to investigating infant learning.
http://www.ehu.es/ehusfera/neurolengua/files/2011/03/Gomez-and-Gerken-2000-TICS.pdf
Infant language researchers have begun by examining four aspects of the language learner’s task. The first involves identification of word-like units in speech. The second involves encoding and remembering the order in which words occur in sentences. The third involves generalization of grammatical relations. The last involves learning at the more abstract level of syntactic categories (e.g. determiner, adjective, noun and verb). This fourth sensitivity is at the root of our unique human ability to produce and comprehend novel utterances.
[Sam: The fundamental flaw to this approach is that we are taking an adult approach to understand how infants acquire languages.]
How does our growing understanding of infant learning abilities bear on the highly constrained language learner described in the introduction? We can identify at least three ways.
First, all of the artificial-language-learning studies discussed have examined infants’ sensitivity to linguistic form in the absence of semantic content. In so far as these studies are tapping sensitivities used in real-language acquisition, they challenge many accounts in which language development is driven by a mapping between meaning and form. This is not to say that learners do not ultimately need to map the syntactic forms they encode during infancy onto meaning. Obviously they do. However, the fact that infants are able to acquire certain aspects of form prior to acquiring the meaning of these forms changes the nature of the language acquisition problem in a fundamental way.
[Sam: Baby's world of language has no meaning. They are just playing with sounds.]
A second implication of the research on infant artificial language learning concerns the specificity of the constraints on the learner. On many accounts, these constraints have been construed as being language specific, such that for every aspect of language to be acquired, the child is born with a specific constraint or parameter that guides him/her to the correct representation. Data showing that infants can use transitional probabilities to segment grammatical tone sequences contrasts with this view, suggesting that they apply statistical learning to linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli alike.The application of statistical sensitivity to the problem of word segmentation is admittedly far from the constraints discussed by linguistic nativists (involving such language-specific notions as whether or not declarative sentences in a particular language must have an overt subject).
[Sam: Chomsky has over complicated the issue by imposing meaning when baby is just playing with sounds.]
A third implication of both the infant artificial-languagelearning studies reviewed here and the myriad studies of infant language perception preceding them concerns the relevance of children’s early utterances as evidence for theories of language acquisition. One of the key observations of linguistic nativists involves errors that children do not make. As noted earlier, children never erroneously transform a statement like ‘The man who is tall is Sam’ into a question like ‘Is the man who tall is Sam? ’ The lack of such errors, along with logical arguments concerning the poverty of the stimulus, have been taken as evidence that children never consider rules based solely on linear order in sentences. Although researchers have begun to address the question of a how a statistical learner might begin to negotiate impoverished input, it is equally important to note that if the studies of infants’ early linguistic abilities tell us anything, it is that they have become sensitive to many aspects of linguistic form a year or more before they ever begin to produce multiword speech. This is not to say that all of language is acquired by the age of 12 months. However, if infant language-perception studies have one theme, it is in demonstrating the extremely complex (and often contrasting) relationship between aspects of their native language infants and young children have tacitly discerned and those they actually produce. Thus, we must exercise caution in interpreting children’s early utterances as evidence for or against the linguistic representations they do and do not entertain.
[Sam: the research has overlooked the different stages of brain development.]
A final comment is in order. Given the vast differences in artificial grammars and natural language, how do we ensure that the learning observed is representative of language learning in the real world? First, in using this approach it is important to design experiments capturing key linguistic phenomena. If we can isolate a phenomenon of interest experimentally, we can go on to test it using a wide range of manipulations, where, presumably, such manipulations are driven by our knowledge of natural language acquisition. For instance, the finding that 18-month-olds, but not 15-montholds track grammatical dependencies separated by one to three intervening syllables, suggests that we should see the same pattern with an artificial grammar designed to investigate such learning Indeed, studies in our joint laboratories show that we do. Another approach, currently being investigated by Saffran and colleagues, is to test whether the output of statistical learning can be used as input to natural language.
Ultimately, however, as with any scientific endeavor, the proof of this approach will depend on the extent to which it generates new ways of understanding the mechanisms involved in natural language acquisition. Its real promise lies in the precision it affords with respect to investigating infant learning.
http://www.ehu.es/ehusfera/neurolengua/files/2011/03/Gomez-and-Gerken-2000-TICS.pdf
8.3.11
Learning starts early
One of the earliest indications was the finding that newborns prefer
their mother’s voice to that of another female.
Newborns also distinguish sentences from their native language from sentences from another language. Passages read in French produced higher sucking rates (as measured by an operant sucking procedure) in French newborns than passages read in Russian
http://www.ehu.es/ehusfera/neurolengua/files/2011/03/Gomez-and-Gerken-2000-TICS.pdf
their mother’s voice to that of another female.
Newborns also distinguish sentences from their native language from sentences from another language. Passages read in French produced higher sucking rates (as measured by an operant sucking procedure) in French newborns than passages read in Russian
http://www.ehu.es/ehusfera/neurolengua/files/2011/03/Gomez-and-Gerken-2000-TICS.pdf
Create a world by naming things
When he was over for Christmas, he was 15 months old and enthralled with naming things. Funny how it really is true that giving names is creating a world (from Genesis onwards), making it your own. He would go around for hours pointing at things and saying their names. “Tee” he would say and point at the Christmas tree. “Gocky!” would accompany a prod to our faithful pet. 15 seconds later, he would rediscover the tree with the same excitement; 15 seconds after that, it was the dog again. Apparently before going to sleep each night, or even in the middle of the night, he would list every word he knew. Is that to make sure he knows his whole world, to feel comfortable that everything is in its place? To make sure that what he experienced during the day exists?
A month passed and I could already hear the difference in how he expressed himself. Earlier it had been just the words; now, there were connections between the words. The “cocky ca” was now owned by “Daddy” = his father’s coffee mug. “Choo choo train kye!” now expressed the fact that a metro train had passed by outside (anything that is outside or a big, open space, is ‘sky’).
In the month that passed, he’s added adjectives to his repertoire. The streets are now filled with ‘gay ca” = gray cars. Most other things, however, are ‘gee’ = green. Is that because it’s his favorite color, so that’s the color that he wants things to be, or has the concept of colors just not registered yet? He also knows the concept of ‘two’ which encompasses all plurals. One doggie, two doggies, two doggies, two doggies… But what this kid does have is a pretty awesome command of phrasal verbs, that bane of every non-native English speaker. He definitely knows when to get out of the stroller, get out the calculator from the vent he’s stuffed it in, and when the train goes away.
Every day is a new adventure when you’re discovering the world and creating logical links between known and unknown things. A piece of spinach puff pastry is dubbed “boki tee” due to its resemblance to a piece of broccoli with its tree-like stem. And sometimes, you see two ‘itty ats” (kitty cats) where all other, older and supposedly wiser people, see nothing.
http://whereismysuitcase.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/enthralled-by-yet-another-language/#comment-72
A month passed and I could already hear the difference in how he expressed himself. Earlier it had been just the words; now, there were connections between the words. The “cocky ca” was now owned by “Daddy” = his father’s coffee mug. “Choo choo train kye!” now expressed the fact that a metro train had passed by outside (anything that is outside or a big, open space, is ‘sky’).
In the month that passed, he’s added adjectives to his repertoire. The streets are now filled with ‘gay ca” = gray cars. Most other things, however, are ‘gee’ = green. Is that because it’s his favorite color, so that’s the color that he wants things to be, or has the concept of colors just not registered yet? He also knows the concept of ‘two’ which encompasses all plurals. One doggie, two doggies, two doggies, two doggies… But what this kid does have is a pretty awesome command of phrasal verbs, that bane of every non-native English speaker. He definitely knows when to get out of the stroller, get out the calculator from the vent he’s stuffed it in, and when the train goes away.
Every day is a new adventure when you’re discovering the world and creating logical links between known and unknown things. A piece of spinach puff pastry is dubbed “boki tee” due to its resemblance to a piece of broccoli with its tree-like stem. And sometimes, you see two ‘itty ats” (kitty cats) where all other, older and supposedly wiser people, see nothing.
http://whereismysuitcase.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/enthralled-by-yet-another-language/#comment-72
Language acquisition is a dynamic interaction
The caregivers actually used simpler language the closer the boy got to grasping a word. At the point they sensed he was on the cusp of getting it, all three primary caregivers – Roy, his wife and their nanny – simplified their language to guide him to the word, then gently brought him into more complex language once he passed the hump.
“For each of the primary caregivers we found the same trend,” Roy said. “We’re getting longer sentences when he doesn’t know the word, and then they start getting shorter, and they’re pretty much at their shortest as he starts to get the word…. Was I consciously doing that? I can’t imagine anyone consciously doing that.”
Roy says it’s evidence of a “continuous feedback loop” that shows caregivers modifying language at a level never reported or suspected before. It’s not just that his son was learning from his linguistic environment, the environment was learning from him, he told the TED audience.
The finding has changed his thinking about causality.
“I now think looking for linear cause effects —where the environment causes certain effects in my child — is a bad formulation,” he says. “Because … as soon as you have feedback loops, it’s a chicken and egg kind of problem to say what was the original cause of something. What you’re actually doing is studying a dynamical system.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/deb-roy-at-ted/
“For each of the primary caregivers we found the same trend,” Roy said. “We’re getting longer sentences when he doesn’t know the word, and then they start getting shorter, and they’re pretty much at their shortest as he starts to get the word…. Was I consciously doing that? I can’t imagine anyone consciously doing that.”
Roy says it’s evidence of a “continuous feedback loop” that shows caregivers modifying language at a level never reported or suspected before. It’s not just that his son was learning from his linguistic environment, the environment was learning from him, he told the TED audience.
The finding has changed his thinking about causality.
“I now think looking for linear cause effects —where the environment causes certain effects in my child — is a bad formulation,” he says. “Because … as soon as you have feedback loops, it’s a chicken and egg kind of problem to say what was the original cause of something. What you’re actually doing is studying a dynamical system.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/deb-roy-at-ted/
The German Debate
03/07/2011
During his visit to Germany, Turkey's prime minister said children of Turks living here should learn Turkish first. His comment sparked a contentious debate. Petra Schulz, a professor for German as a second language, discusses the issue with SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL: During a visit to Germany last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: "Our children must learn German, but they must learn good Turkish first." Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle says: "Children who grow up in Germany must learn German as the very first thing." Who's right?
Schulz: If Mr. Westerwelle means that Turkish parents in Germany should, as a matter of principle, speak German with their own children, he is wrong, at least from the standpoint of language acquisition research. What sort of German would it be? Probably very broken German, in many cases. This sort of a role wouldn't do anyone any good.
SPIEGEL: So is the order Erdogan proposes better?
Schulz: With this type of family, yes, but German should be added as early as possible, even before the first language is completely developed. The human brain is very well equipped to learning more than one language at the same time.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,749442,00.html
During his visit to Germany, Turkey's prime minister said children of Turks living here should learn Turkish first. His comment sparked a contentious debate. Petra Schulz, a professor for German as a second language, discusses the issue with SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL: During a visit to Germany last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: "Our children must learn German, but they must learn good Turkish first." Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle says: "Children who grow up in Germany must learn German as the very first thing." Who's right?
Schulz: If Mr. Westerwelle means that Turkish parents in Germany should, as a matter of principle, speak German with their own children, he is wrong, at least from the standpoint of language acquisition research. What sort of German would it be? Probably very broken German, in many cases. This sort of a role wouldn't do anyone any good.
SPIEGEL: So is the order Erdogan proposes better?
Schulz: With this type of family, yes, but German should be added as early as possible, even before the first language is completely developed. The human brain is very well equipped to learning more than one language at the same time.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,749442,00.html
7.3.11
Would a language be forgotten after prolong disuse?
Language development involves two processes in the brain, (1) an operating system of voice recognition and (2)a data base of vocabularies and contents.
The voice recognition system is developed during a critical period in the first 9 months after birth, with the automatic wiring of language neurons. As an operating system, like the CPU, it is kept for life.
The data base of vocabularies and contents is like a hard disc. You can input data any time. But you can easily lose it after prolong disuse.
How do we know that the voice recognition system is kept for life?
We can only recognize sounds that are found in our voice recognition system. When the brain receives an alien sound not found in the system, it will be directed to the nearest sound in the system. Japanese cannot distinguish between L and R. Indians will say "dan giu" instead of "thank you".
For people who have completely forgotten a particular language, they can pick it up much faster than people who have never been exposed to that language. They can imitate and pronounce the words like a native speaker. This ability is not found in people who have never been exposed to the language.
Multi-lingual speakers are far more gifted in learning new languages than monolingual speakers. Multi-lingual speakers have a voice recognition system far more powerful than that of a monolingual speaker. When you can recognize a sound, you can say it. When you cannot recognize a sound, you can't.
So, don't worry if you have forgotten a language because of prolong disuse. Spend a little time on it in building up the necessary vocabulary, the language will come back quickly.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201103/language-forgetting
The voice recognition system is developed during a critical period in the first 9 months after birth, with the automatic wiring of language neurons. As an operating system, like the CPU, it is kept for life.
The data base of vocabularies and contents is like a hard disc. You can input data any time. But you can easily lose it after prolong disuse.
How do we know that the voice recognition system is kept for life?
We can only recognize sounds that are found in our voice recognition system. When the brain receives an alien sound not found in the system, it will be directed to the nearest sound in the system. Japanese cannot distinguish between L and R. Indians will say "dan giu" instead of "thank you".
For people who have completely forgotten a particular language, they can pick it up much faster than people who have never been exposed to that language. They can imitate and pronounce the words like a native speaker. This ability is not found in people who have never been exposed to the language.
Multi-lingual speakers are far more gifted in learning new languages than monolingual speakers. Multi-lingual speakers have a voice recognition system far more powerful than that of a monolingual speaker. When you can recognize a sound, you can say it. When you cannot recognize a sound, you can't.
So, don't worry if you have forgotten a language because of prolong disuse. Spend a little time on it in building up the necessary vocabulary, the language will come back quickly.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201103/language-forgetting
訂閱：
文章 (Atom)