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Newborn Babies Have Inbuilt Ability to Pick Out Words

posted by mrpg on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the natural-born-speakers dept.

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Newborn babies are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language, a new study published in Developmental Science reveals.

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition.

[...] The researchers discovered two mechanisms in three-day-old infants, which give them the skills to pick out words in a stream of sounds.

The first mechanism is known as prosody, the melody of language, allow us to recognise when a word starts and stops.

The second is called the statistics of language, which describes how we compute the frequency of when sounds in a word come together.

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:11AM

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:11AM (#794480)

    It also helps when speaking in a large echoing hall/church/cave or using complete shite communications media like Whatsapp and Skype.

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