SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:01PM (1 child)
I don't know what Noam Chomsky said about this very topic, so I can't realize anything about whether he was right on it.
But what I know for sure, by application of basic logic, is that if he was right on it, this doesn't allow any definitive conclusion whether he was right on anything else. After all, if I claimed that (a) 47 is a prime number, and (b) 69 is a power of two, and you discovered that I was right on (a), that does not imply in the slightest that I was also right on (b).
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:43PM
Your point, oh magnificent AC of admitted ignorance? I hope your confession has done some good for your soul, since it has contributed nothing to the discussion of whether language is innate.