Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Researchers said on Tuesday (July 24) that a computer program can point out how people learn to talk by learning to decode sounds from different languages just as a baby does.
They said the finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world's languages.
"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems," said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
McClelland says his computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.
Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.
By: DocMemory
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