Have you recently listened to people speaking unfamiliar languages? If
you haven’t, turn on your radio or TV set, select a station from another
country, and within minutes you will hit a broadcast with loquacious
individuals talking all the time. Alternatively, if you live in a
metropolis, go down onto the streets and spot groups of animated
people speaking foreign languages. Listen attentively. You will soon
notice that humans produce continuous streams of uninterrupted speech.
The overall impression? Phonological porridge, polenta, bouillie. For
the non-initiated listener, it is hard to grasp that there is much structure
to such seemingly random proliferation of sound. The reality is
different, of course. Any single language you come across on Earth is as
differentiated, distinguished, beautiful, and funny as your native
language. Impenetrable as foreign languages appear to be, on the scale
of a human lifetime, they are just around the corner – give them two or
three years, and any of them is yours. It is a refreshing thought that all
humans are brothers and sisters in language.
A porridge-like sense of unintelligibility prevails even after years of
language classes at school. You are able to decipher a restaurant menu
and order a dish of spaghetti, but comprehension vanishes as soon as the
waiter starts talking. The same happens with bakers, taxi drivers, and
hotel employees – again polenta and pea soup. It seems as if years of
classes studying grammar and learning long lists of vocabulary produce
little or no effect. You can read Goethe, Shakespeare, Sartre, Cervantes,
or Dante, and yet you don’t understand their descendants. Manyconclude that we are inept at learning other languages and never try
again.
The apparent easiness with which humans learn their native language
during the first years of life, is intriguing. Not only do young children
readily soak up any of the thousands of possible human languages, but
they also learn to understand a huge variety of radically different
pronunciations – mum and dad, the neighbours, the fisherman at the
street corner, people speaking other dialects, stuttering infants, and
toothless grandparents. To date, there is no machine capable of this
level of speech recognition.
How do young children outperform the most sophisticated machines?
How do they structure linguistic input into meaningful units so rapidly?
To answer these questions, look at how you spent the first 6 months of
your life. As a physiological preterm primate, your interactions with the
world were pretty limited – eating, digesting, looking, and listening.
With such a limited repertoire of actions, every single action necessarily
received an immense share of your attention. Once digestion was
settled, you mutated into an ear-and-eye monster, capturing shapes and
movements around you and soaking in every single sound you heard.
You didn’t lose a minute setting about the most important task of your
life: putting structure into the sound produced by the people who
inhabited your life. The first hurdle was determining the word
boundaries within the language of your ancestors. Where do single
words begin; where do they end?
As you see from Figure 2.1, the sound wave per se does not confer
information about the boundaries between single words. To show the
magnitude of the task you face in a new language, try to delimit the
word boundaries:
you haven’t, turn on your radio or TV set, select a station from another
country, and within minutes you will hit a broadcast with loquacious
individuals talking all the time. Alternatively, if you live in a
metropolis, go down onto the streets and spot groups of animated
people speaking foreign languages. Listen attentively. You will soon
notice that humans produce continuous streams of uninterrupted speech.
The overall impression? Phonological porridge, polenta, bouillie. For
the non-initiated listener, it is hard to grasp that there is much structure
to such seemingly random proliferation of sound. The reality is
different, of course. Any single language you come across on Earth is as
differentiated, distinguished, beautiful, and funny as your native
language. Impenetrable as foreign languages appear to be, on the scale
of a human lifetime, they are just around the corner – give them two or
three years, and any of them is yours. It is a refreshing thought that all
humans are brothers and sisters in language.
A porridge-like sense of unintelligibility prevails even after years of
language classes at school. You are able to decipher a restaurant menu
and order a dish of spaghetti, but comprehension vanishes as soon as the
waiter starts talking. The same happens with bakers, taxi drivers, and
hotel employees – again polenta and pea soup. It seems as if years of
classes studying grammar and learning long lists of vocabulary produce
little or no effect. You can read Goethe, Shakespeare, Sartre, Cervantes,
or Dante, and yet you don’t understand their descendants. Manyconclude that we are inept at learning other languages and never try
again.
The apparent easiness with which humans learn their native language
during the first years of life, is intriguing. Not only do young children
readily soak up any of the thousands of possible human languages, but
they also learn to understand a huge variety of radically different
pronunciations – mum and dad, the neighbours, the fisherman at the
street corner, people speaking other dialects, stuttering infants, and
toothless grandparents. To date, there is no machine capable of this
level of speech recognition.
How do young children outperform the most sophisticated machines?
How do they structure linguistic input into meaningful units so rapidly?
To answer these questions, look at how you spent the first 6 months of
your life. As a physiological preterm primate, your interactions with the
world were pretty limited – eating, digesting, looking, and listening.
With such a limited repertoire of actions, every single action necessarily
received an immense share of your attention. Once digestion was
settled, you mutated into an ear-and-eye monster, capturing shapes and
movements around you and soaking in every single sound you heard.
You didn’t lose a minute setting about the most important task of your
life: putting structure into the sound produced by the people who
inhabited your life. The first hurdle was determining the word
boundaries within the language of your ancestors. Where do single
words begin; where do they end?
As you see from Figure 2.1, the sound wave per se does not confer
information about the boundaries between single words. To show the
magnitude of the task you face in a new language, try to delimit the
word boundaries:
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