Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:43PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:43PM (#794640) Journal

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2