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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


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 01 2019, @04:33PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 01 2019, @04:33PM (#795065) Homepage Journal

    I've been told by a friend that even Chomsky doesn't believe in his transformational grammars any more as describing how the brain works.

    Furthermore, he isn't the original discoverer of transformational grammar. That was the guy who wrote down the grammar of Sanskrit several thousand hears ago. He used a transformational grammar.

    They are still useful formalisms.

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