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: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:01AM (3 children)
I've found that separating your words by (sorry about this) "finishing", "speaking", "one", "word", "before", "starting", "to", "speak", "the", "next", albeit incovenient and very stilted, improves comprehension when speaking to a non-native English speaker, or speech recognition software for that matter.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:09AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:11AM
It also helps when speaking in a large echoing hall/church/cave or using complete shite communications media like Whatsapp and Skype.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:26PM
Look! It's William Shatner!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:23AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:47PM
Well, you also know what R2-D2 is saying even though he's not speaking human language. Of course, George Lucas corrected that problem by having all cast communicate in baby-talk throughout the duration of episodes I-III.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:24AM (9 children)
Everyone realizes that this means that Noam Chomsy was right, about this and many other things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:28AM
He certainly was. If you have some spare time and access to one of these platforms, I would suggest http://requiemfortheamericandream.com/watch/ [requiemfortheamericandream.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:31AM (2 children)
But not how to spell his name, apparently.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:29PM (1 child)
What a k between friends?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 31 2019, @04:21PM
My initial attempt was "Chompsky", which looked incorrect, but strangely appropriate.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:26PM
Some may. Surely, not everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(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.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday February 01 2019, @01:14AM (1 child)
I don't see anything in this that suggests proof of Generative Grammars or Deep Structure or other such absurdities. (Just my opinion, but while Chomsky rightly called out Skinner on his BS, Chomsky's own BS subsequently has kept language cognition studies in their infancy for decades, as people have chased these wacky ideas of Deep Structure, etc.)
This study seems to be more on the order of a baby animal recognizing basic psychoacoustical characteristics of calls from its own species. If you mean Chomsky was right in that humans merely have some cognitive setup to process auditory phenomena associated with common human vocalizations (i.e., speech), then sure... Chomsky and Pinker and pretty much everyone back to Plato that suggested some innate cognitive processing for language phenomena were right.
But "deep structure"? I don't see that in this study.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 01 2019, @04:33PM
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.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:03AM (12 children)
So I was giving my speech, beautiful speech about China. Very powerful. And we have the "oh, wah wah wah." That's right, some idiot had brought her baby. And I said, don’t worry about that baby, I love babies, I hear that baby crying, I like it. What a baby, what a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, the mom’s running around, don’t worry about it, It’s young and beautiful and healthy, that’s what we want. And I got back to China, back to the devaluation.
She didn't get the hint. Can you believe it? I was talking about the devaluation, I gave the shout out to the baby. Big big hint. But she didn't get it. So I said, actually, I was only kidding. I said, you can get the baby out of here. And I think she really believed me, that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:15AM (11 children)
You are the reason I stopped logging into this website, and haven't subscribed in over a year. Enjoy it, faggot.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:44AM (3 children)
I second that. It's getting as bad as the bullshit from /.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:46PM (2 children)
Wait... my comment and the one above are marked as -1 Troll but the real troll is isn't? This really is /. of another color.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:45PM (1 child)
I just dropped the well-deserved -1 Troll on him.
And if it weren't for the fact that for whatever reason the shit-for-brains management of this place doesn't consider his useless, ubiquitous shitposting spam, it would have been a Spam mod.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:04PM
"whatever reason"
We know the reason, many of them are internet trolls here for the lulz. The admire trolling! Sadly this is probably the healthiest step away from christian fundamentalism they are capable of making.
(Score: 4, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:08PM (2 children)
You forgot your Password because of me. That's very special. Remembering Passwords is easy. It's called Post-It Notes!!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:29PM (1 child)
You need a post-it note to remember 12345?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 01 2019, @07:21AM
Sounds like the kind of thing an asshole would have on his luggage...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:55PM
I love DJT posting so much I bought him a subscription. Guess it all works out even.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:13PM (2 children)
"Why so serious?"
Are you actually taking that seriously?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)
Some people don't enjoy repeated heavy trolling.
I recall one libertarian friend who declared that if someone made him angry his strategy was to try and piss them off more, and that seemed to transfer his anger away. A pretty shitty tactic that doesn't even work long term, a form of emotional suppression / transference that doesn't solve the underlying problems.
Can't say I'm surprised, the people around here that admire trolling tend to over inflate their own value while using stupid tactics to evade engaging valid criticisms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @11:49AM
I'm not admiring trolling, but that is just funny. Lighten up.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:17PM (2 children)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6d/36/fa/6d36fa7cc9d762952a62c7374095c685.jpg [pinimg.com]
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
Is that cartoon infringement?
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:49PM
Not if we had reasonable copyright laws that were limited to 25 years.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @01:21AM
3 days after birth the child has already been listening to their parents for a few months. So I question the assertion that this is "innate".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:04AM
What about copyright?! The babies could be stealing movie lines and song lyrics! They must be a new tax on babies to compensate MAFIAA and perhaps some pennies for the artists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @07:21AM
They're 9 months old and will have been learning for some of that time.