[language] [Fwd: [evol-psych] Infants may offer clues to language development]

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Subject: [evol-psych] Infants may offer clues to language development
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 10:16:57 +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



[ Back to EurekAlert! ] <http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php?start=25>
Public release date: 17-Feb-2003
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Contact: Jenny Saffran
jsaffran at facstaff.wisc.edu <mailto:jsaffran at facstaff.wisc.edu>
608-262-9942
University of Wisconsin-Madison <http://www.wisc.edu/>


  Infants may offer clues to language development


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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.
Photo by: Jeff Miller
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full size image available through contact

DENVER - You may not know it, but you took a course in linguistics as a
baby.

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.

These results were presented here today, Monday, Feb. 17, at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Findings from this study will be published in an upcoming issue of the
journal Developmental Psychology.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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. "

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.

###

NOTE TO PHOTO EDITORS/MULTIMEDIA EDITORS: To download high-resolution
photos and a sample sound file to accompany this story, please visit:
http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/saffran.html

- Emily Carlson 608-262-9772, emilycarlson at facstaff.wisc.edu
<mailto:emilycarlson at facstaff.wisc.edu>

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/uow-imo021103.php


News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 86 - 8th February, 2003
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue86.html

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