Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and “taking statistics” on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
I found this to be somewhat disappointing. I was expecting a demonstration of statistical reasoning in infants (based on your comments), which would indeed have been amazing. If you merely replace the phrase ‘taking statistics’ with the word ‘learning’ throughout her talk you get precisely the same information about what is going on in infants’ brainsâ??none.
But I did appreciate the demonstration that machine learning is not effective and that social brain processes have a necessary role in language development. Definitely worth posting…. thank you.
There’s a longer (and wordier!) version of her talk that I included along with the one above on my blog, which contains a little more detail. It is a pity that she didn’t explain what the importance of the “statistics” is. I thought to on my blog, but then didn’t have time. Very basically, consider a stream of sound and trying to identify the recurring “motifs” that make up the basic linguistic elements. It’s not quite the learning I think you mean, but using a sort of frequency analysis to pick out the “units” that language should be built upon.
Thanks Grant, sounds interesting. I’ll check it out.
Jamie: (based on your comments) I made no comments. That’s a quote from the source of the video, their phrasing. I tend to agree with you.
Grant, love your post.
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