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<body><><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><><BR>
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<th valign="baseline" align="right" nowrap="nowrap">Subject: </th>
<td>[evol-psych] Infants may offer clues to language development</td>
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<td>Wed, 19 Feb 2003 10:16:57 +0000</td>
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<th valign="baseline" align="right" nowrap="nowrap">From: </th>
<td>Ian Pitchford <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:ian.pitchford@scientist.com"><ian.pitchford@scientist.com></a></td>
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<td>Ian Pitchford <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:ian.pitchford@scientist.com"><ian.pitchford@scientist.com></a></td>
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<td><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://human-nature.com">http://human-nature.com</a></td>
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<th valign="baseline" align="right" nowrap="nowrap">To: </th>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com">evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com</a></td>
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</a> <strong class="relemb">Public release date: 17-Feb-2003</strong><br>
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Contact: Jenny Saffran<br>
<a href="mailto:jsaffran@facstaff.wisc.edu">jsaffran@facstaff.wisc.edu</a><br>
608-262-9942<br>
<span class="relinst"><a href="http://www.wisc.edu/">University of Wisconsin-Madison</a></span>
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<h1 class="title"><font face="Arial"><font size="2">Infants may offer clues
to language development</font></font></h1>
<h2 class="subtitle"></h2>
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<hr> <img height="150"
src="http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_graphics/Saffran_auditory.jpg"
width="200">
<hr> </center>
<span class="imagecaption">Caption: A TV monitor displays a video
camera image of David Niergarth and his 9-mount-old son Harper in a
sound-proof room during their volunteer participation in an infant
auditory test study led by psychology professor Jenny Saffran at the
Waisman Center Infant Learning Lab.<br>
Photo by: Jeff Miller <br>
<hr> Full size image available through contact </span></td>
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<p><!-- End image here --><font face="Arial"><font size="2">DENVER - You
may not know it, but you took a course in linguistics as a baby. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">By listening to the talk around them,
infants pick up sound patterns that help them understand the speech they
hear, according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But this research also shows that some patterns are easier to identify,
suggesting that the development of human language may have been shaped by
what infants could learn. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">These results were presented here today,
Monday, Feb. 17, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">In a series of forthcoming papers, psychologist
Jenny Saffran, who directs the Infant Learning Laboratory at UW-Madison,
suggests how infants quickly acquire language, specifically their ability
to find word boundaries - where words begin and end - from a steady stream
of speech. "We've known for a long time that babies acquire language rapidly,"
she says, "but what we haven't known is how they do it." </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">In all her studies, Saffran introduces
her infant listeners to an artificial, or nonsense, language. Examples of
words include "giku," "tuka" and "bugo." By using these made-up words, which
the tiny listeners have never heard before, Saffran can isolate particular
elements found in natural languages such as English. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">For just a couple of minutes, the infants
hear dozens of two-syllable words strung together in a stream of monotone
speech, unbroken by any pauses (for example, gikutukabugo...). The words
are presented in a particular order that reveals a sound pattern. If babies
recognize the pattern, says Saffran, they will use it to quickly identify
word boundaries in what they hear next. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">To test this, Saffran introduces her
listeners to a new string of nonsense words in which only some of them fit
the pattern heard earlier. Saffran records how long the infants listen to
the parts that conform to the pattern and the parts that don't. A significant
difference in times, she explains, means the infants did pick up the pattern.
</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">As her recent studies show, infants
do learn sound patterns, which then help them learn words and, ultimately,
grammar. Their ability to do this, however, depends on age. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">By exposing infants who are 6-and-a-half
and 9 months old to a string of made-up words in a certain order, Saffran
learned that the two age groups use different strategies to determine where
words end and begin. While the younger listeners identified word boundaries
by relying on the likelihood that certain sounds occur together, the older
listeners paid attention to what speech sounds were emphasized, or stressed.
Because 90 percent of two-syllable words in English follow the same stress
pattern, says Saffran, infants can use the pattern to determine the word
boundaries. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">"At different points in development,
babies orient towards some cues and not others," says Saffran. Why? "More
linguistic experience." Before infants can recognize that stressed and unstressed
syllables are reliable indicators of word boundaries, explains Saffran,
they must first know a few words - lessons they learn earlier by learning
which sounds are likely to occur together. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">Findings from this study will be published
in an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Psychology. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">Once infants go from syllables to words,
they then can recognize simple grammars, according to Saffran's second study
now in press at the journal Infancy. At age one year - just three months
after babies begin using stress cues - infants can recognize patterns in
word orderings. After listening to a continuous string of words in a particular
order, the infants were able to identify permissible word orderings. Just
as noted in the other study, Saffran says that only after prior learning
can infants acquire additional language abilities: "Until they learn words,
the grammar is invisible." </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">While these two studies looked at babies'
ability to acquire sound patterns common in natural languages, a recent
third study by the Wisconsin psychologist investigated infants' ability
to acquire patterns not often heard in everyday speech. The question Saffran
wanted to answer, she says, was, "'Does language work in a way that best
fits the brain?'" In other words: Are certain sound patterns more common
than others because they make it easier for infants to learn language? This
study is in press at Developmental Psychology. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">Unlike the other studies, which exposed
infants to generalizations in language patterns, such as the grouping of
sounds, this study tested an infant's ability to recognize something more
specific - that syllables begin with some sounds, such as /p/, /d/ and /k/,
but not others, such as /b/, /t/ and /g/. This pattern, says Saffran, is
uncommon in phonological systems, which tend to place restrictions on types
of sound segments, not individual ones. </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">As Saffran found when she measured how
long the infants listened to words that did and didn't conform to the rare
pattern, there was no significant difference in the listening times. This
finding, she says, suggests that babies had difficulty acquiring the pattern.
</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">The infants' difficulty in identifying
the unusual sound pattern in this third study, she says, is likely to be
the result of removing information helpful to young listeners as they acquire
language. "There are certain types of patterns that they're better at picking
up," adds Saffran. "Perhaps human languages have these patterns to make
language more learnable. " </font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">Asking questions about what an infant
can't learn, she says, can be just as interesting and informative as asking
ones about what they can learn. In addition to providing knowledge about
language deficits in some children, the answers could offer clues to how
human language first developed and how it has evolved. </font></font></p>
<p> </p>
<div align="center"><font face="Arial"><font size="2">###</font></font></div>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">NOTE TO PHOTO EDITORS/MULTIMEDIA EDITORS:
To download high-resolution photos and a sample sound file to accompany
this story, please visit: <a
href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/saffran.html">http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/saffran.html</a>
</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2">- Emily Carlson 608-262-9772, <a
href="mailto:emilycarlson@facstaff.wisc.edu">emilycarlson@facstaff.wisc.edu</a>
</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Arial"><font size="2"><a
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/uow-imo021103.php">http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/uow-imo021103.php</a></font></font></p>
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<tt> News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 86 - 8th February, 2003
<br>
<a href="http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue86.html">http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue86.html</a>
</tt> <br>
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