[language] [Fwd: [evol-psych] Baby talk]

[H.M. Hubey]

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The three vowels were the Trubetkoy vowels /uia/, and the
ee (i.e. /i/) that was recognized is the "supervowel"
(so-named by Nearey). Isn't that interesting?




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [evol-psych] Baby talk
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 12:13:28 +0000
From: Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford at scientist.com>
Reply-To: Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford at scientist.com>
Organization: http://human-nature.com/
To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com

Public release date: 2-Jan-2002
Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles at rbi.co.uk
44-207-331-2751
New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com

Baby talk

BABY talk sounds silly, but it makes sense to babies. The reason? It's
easier
to understand than normal English-at least to the ears of a new
speech-recognition software system.

Patricia Kuhl and her team at the University of Washington in
Seattle-who
invented the system-had already studied the carefully articulated vowel
sounds
adults use to talk to babies and toddlers. They found that these
baby-talk
vowels are not just spoken more clearly but are phonetically different
to their
adult equivalents. People seem to speak in this way whatever their
language, so
the researchers wondered if baby talk helps children to learn to speak.

But they could not test the idea directly. "You can't do the experiment
because
you would need to take one group of children and prevent them being
exposed to
infant-directed speech," says Bart de Boer, a researcher in Kuhl's
group.

So de Boer has simulated the experiment by writing a simple computer
program
that picks out key vowels in English. He chose "o", "oo" and "ee"
because the
sounds are very distinctive.

De Boer played the computer recordings of 10 mothers saying the words
"sock",
"shoe" and "sheep" in two different ways. In one set, the mothers were
talking
to another adult, while in the other they were talking to their babies.

The computer's task was to distinguish between the three vowel sounds.
After
analysing about 200 infant-directed words, the computer could easily
tell the
sounds apart. But when it listened to the same number of recordings of
the
words as spoken to adults, it recognised only "ee" correctly.

De Boer does not claim that his program learns in the same way as a
child. But
he says that, like the computer, babies probably understand baby talk
better
than grown-up speech because of its more distinct vowels.

He hopes his program could also help computer language systems recognise
different dialects. But Deb Roy, of MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, is not so sure. "This is really telling you more about
what
adults are doing in talking to their infants than telling you how to
build a
computer system," he says.


###
Author: Eugenie Samuel

New Scientist issue: 5th January 2002

PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF
PUBLISHING
ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO: http://www.newscientist.com





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