How children pick up a language: another study (Humans)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 07, 2016, 16:27 (3089 days ago) @ dhw

This is a careful study of infants as hey listen to language:-https://aeon.co/ideas/listening-to-speech-has-remarkable-effects-on-a-baby-s-brain?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5ee2a8ee63-Daily_Newsletter_7_June_20166_7_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-5ee2a8ee63-68942561 -"But how, and when, do infants begin to link language to meaning?-"We know that the path of language acquisition begins long before infants charm us with their first words. From the beginning, infants are listening, and they clearly prefer some sounds over others. How could we possibly know this? Newborn infants can't point to what they like or crawl away from what they don't. But when infants' interest is captured by a particular sight or sound, they will suck rapidly and vigorously on a pacifier.-"Using rates of sucking as a metric, infancy researchers have discovered that, at birth, infants prefer hearing the vocalisations of humans and non-human primates. Then, within months, they narrow their preference specifically to human vocalisations. And toward the end of their first year, infants become ‘native listeners', homing in with increasing precision on the particular sounds of their own native language.-***-"In other words, when we form object categories, we streamline our subsequent learning.-"We can now turn to the question at hand: do infants link language and object categories? To address this, with my colleagues Alissa Ferry and Sue Hespos, we invited three- and four-month-old infants and their parents to visit our lab at Northwestern University in Illinois. Once infants were settled in and seated comfortably on their parents' laps, we showed them a series of different objects, all from the same object category, such as dinosaurs.-***-"Listening to human language had a powerful effect. Three- and four-month-olds listening to language successfully formed object categories; infants listening to the tone sequences did not. Thus, even before infants can roll over in their cribs, listening to language boosted their cognition.-***-"Infants' responses to the lemur vocalisations were striking. At three and four months, listening to lemurs conferred precisely the same advantage as human language. Interestingly, although our infants had considerable exposure to human language, and very little, if any, to lemur calls, human and lemur vocalisations offered our youngest infants precisely the same cognitive advantage. This tells us that infants initially make a broad link between ‘language' and cognition, one that includes vocalisations of both human and non-human primates, our closest genealogical cousins. But by six months, lemur calls no longer offered this cognitive advantage; only human language did the trick.-***-
"For example, one of the most complex problems that infants face is gaining insight into the minds of others. It turns out that infants' headway in ‘mind reading' is supported by language. By six months, infants appreciate the communicative status of speech, and view it as a conduit between minds, a channel through which we can share goals and intentions.-"These glimpses into the infant mind illuminate the mystery of how infants forge a link between language and thought. They also give new meaning to the words of the poet Rita Mae Brown: ‘Language exerts a hidden power, like the tides on the Moon.'-"Listening to language exerts its hidden power far earlier than even the most devoted parents, teachers or policy-makers could ever have imagined. Language is an elixir - and infants drink it in. It fuels the infant's mind and catalyses her quintessentially human psychological capacities from the very beginning."-Comment: Shows the progression of infants learning, but doesn't suggest an underlying innate grammar in the brain, but their speed of understanding speech does not deny it either.