Infants don’t learn language like neural nets do. Unlike nets, no feedback is involved, which amazingly, makes learning faster.
As is typical of research in psychology, the hard part is thinking of something clever to do, rather than actually carrying it out.
[ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 117 pp. 26548 – 26549 ’20 ] is a short interview with psychologist Richard N. Aslin. Here’s a link — hopefully not behind a paywall — https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/43/26548.full.pdf.
He was interested in how babies pull out words from a stream of speech.
He took a commonsense argument and ran with it.
“The learning that I studied as an undergrad was reinforcement learning—that is, you’re getting a reward for responding to certain kinds of input—but it seemed that that kind of learning, in language acquisition, didn’t make any sense. The mother is not saying, “listen to this word…no, that’s the wrong word, listen to this word,” and giving them feedback. It’s all done just by being exposed to the language without any obvious reward”
So they performed an experiment whose results surprised them. They made a ‘language’ of speech sounds which weren’t words and presented them 4 per second for a few minutes, to 8 month old infants. There was an underlying statistical structure, as certain sounds were more likely to follow another one, others were less likely. That’s it. No training. No feedback. No nothin’, just a sequence of sounds. Then they presented sequences (from the same library of sounds) which the baby hadn’t heard before and the baby recognized them as different. The interview didn’t say how they knew the baby was recognizing them, but my guess is that they used the mismatch negativity brain potential which automatically arises to novel stimuli.
Had you ever heard of this? I hadn’t but the references to the author’s papers go back to 1996 ! Time for someone to replicate this work.
So our brains have an innate ability to measure statistical probability of distinct events occurring. Even better we react to the unexpected event. This may be the ‘language facility’ Chomsky was talking about half a century ago. Perhaps this innate ability is the origin of music, the most abstract of the arts.
How infants learn language is likely inherently fascinating to many, not just neurologists.
Here are links to some other posts on the subject you might be interested in.
https://luysii.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/how-infants-learn-language-iv/
https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/how-infants-learn-language-iii/
https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/how-infants-learn-language-ii/
https://luysii.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/how-infants-learn-language/
Chemiotics II 