How children pick up a language: new study re words (Humans)

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 30, 2019, 23:03 (2122 days ago) @ David Turell

Very young babies are shown to pick out words very early in life:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/newborns-can-isolate-words-from-speech

"Babies are born with the ability to pick out distinct words from continuous speech, according to a study published in the journal Developmental Science.

"Picking out individual words is a necessary first step for language development, but it’s challenging because speech lacks clear boundaries.

“Language is incredibly complicated,” says lead author Ana Flò, from the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France. “We often think of language as being made up of words, but words often blur together when we talk.”

"Infants appear to have worked out how to detect words by the middle of their first year. But it’s not clear whether they have these “segmentation abilities” from birth or develop them through language exposure and/or brain development.

***

"In both experiments, babies were exposed to a three-minute familiarisation phase involving a stream of syllables that gave either statistical distribution or prosody cues.

"The researchers used a non-invasive brain imaging technique, Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, during a subsequent test phase to show if infants could identify word boundaries.

"They found that the newborns were able to detect distinct words in both conditions. That means they can use both mechanisms, independently from each other.

“'Our study showed that at just three days old, without understanding what it means, they are able to pick out individual words from speech,” Flò says.

"The findings also suggest that “newborns have remarkable short-term memory capacities”, the authors write.

“'We think this study highlights how sentient newborn babies really are and how much information they are absorbing,” says co-investigator Alissa Ferry from the University of Manchester, UK."

Comment: This appears to be an innate ability and humans are definitely programmed to have speech and language.