I was reminded of a recent science article this morning. Erik was speaking Swedish to my one-year-old grandson, and John said he shows the three-year-old foreign-language cartoons because it’s a great age to get an ear for them.
I recalled something interesting in the NY Times. Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist wrote, “Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble …
“But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking?
“Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds.
“Researchers who focus on infant language and those who specialize in birdsong have teamed up in a new study suggesting that learning the transitions between syllables — from “da” to “do” and “do” to “da” — is the crucial bottleneck between babbling and speaking. …
“The lead author, Dina Lipkind, a psychology researcher at Hunter College in Manhattan [said], “What we’re showing is that babbling is not only to learn sounds, but also to learn transitions between sounds.” …
“At first, however, the scientists behind these findings weren’t studying human infants at all. They were studying birds.
“ ‘When I got into this, I never believed we were going to learn about human speech,’ said Ofer Tchernichovski, a birdsong researcher at Hunter and the senior author of the study, published [in] the journal Nature. …
“Dr. Tchernichovski and Gary Marcus, who studies infant language learning at New York University and who helped design the study, discussed the results. Could the difficulty learning transitions in songbirds hold true for human infants?
“By analyzing an existing data set of recordings of infant babbling, they found that as babies introduce a new syllable into their repertory, they first tend to repeat it (‘do-do-do’). Then, like the birds, they begin appending it to the beginning or end of syllable strings (‘do-da-da’ or ‘da-da-do’), eventually inserting it between other syllables (‘da-do–da’).” More.
Photo: Iva Ljubicic
A juvenile zebra finch, right, perched next to a plastic model, which helps the bird learn to sing. Researchers have discovered that babies learn to babble much as birds learn to sing.
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