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Published on: 8/24/2001
Last Visited: 6/8/2002
But lead researcher Michael Brent, an associate professor of computer science and genetics, believes otherwise.
"Short utterances lay bare the structure of language," Brent says."Longer utterances may be helpful when the children are older and learning words faster," but in the infant stage, he says, a mother's use of isolated words forms a foundation for early vocabulary learning.
He does, however, agree that, "although hearing words in isolation appears to be a factor, there are lots of other factors that correlate with a baby's ability to use a word."
In the latest study, eight mothers of infants agreed to be recorded in their homes during a series of 14 visits while the babies were 9 months to 15 months old.Each taping lasted one to two hours.The tapes were transcribed and plugged into a computer program to analyze the times of each utterance, its beginning and end, within a twentieth of a second, allowing researchers to isolate single words.
Checking periodically, the researchers found that the more frequently a mother used a word in isolation, the more likely her child was to know that word later.However, how frequently the mother used the word was not a predictor of whether the child would add it to his or her vocabulary.
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"What we found was that, while infants can segment speech, it seems to be relatively rare for young infants to learn words that are not spoken in isolation," Brent says.Of all utterances the mothers spoke to their children, 9 percent were isolated words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the study says.Results were presented last week in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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"If he's right," Bloom says of Brent, "learning language isn't as hard as we think."
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Brent admits one limitation of his study is that all the mothers involved had undergraduate or graduate degrees.He says his next step will be to work with mothers who are not as highly educated.
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So, how does Brent, a computer scientist, plan to use babytalk to create artificial intelligence?"By using computer models which can break down the language into sentences, symbols, letters and meaningful patterns," he says, "we can build a model that can pick out patterns and recover those patterns."
The computer models he envisions would be able to "categorize nouns, verbs, find suffixes, learn word meanings and extract grammar," he says.
The same type of programs that can break the code of patterns, and pattern recognition, Brent says, could help decipher the genomes of humans and other species.
"We're trying to convince the world that linguists can contribute to genomics," he says.
What To Do
"Don't worry about what you say to your kids," Brent says."Instinctively, parents use this type of speech.It's just important to talk to your kids."
To learn more about language acquisition, visit the ThinkQuest Web site.
Read about the latest advances in computerized speech recognition and synthesis from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
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