Is Language Innate or Learned?
Japanese, Canadian, and Stanford University researchers have designed a novel computer program that, through listening to samples of speech, was able to identify different categories of sounds without any human guidance. These findings shed light on how human infants learn language.
“In the past, there has been a strong tendency to think that language is very special and that the mechanisms involved are predetermined by evolutionary constraints, and are not very general,” says James McClelland, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University who worked on the project. “What we are saying is, Look, we can use a very general approach and do quite well learning aspects of language.”
The group of researchers developed the program’s software by incorporating features of machine learning into a neural network model. They then recorded the speech of mothers talking to their babies–Canadian mothers speaking English, and Japanese mothers speaking Japanese. The researchers extracted the parameters of the vowel sounds that the mothers were using in their speech and gave their program presentations of samples from the mothers’ distribution of vowel sounds. The researchers tested four vowel sounds.
The program was able to bunch together the sounds it was hearing into only a few vowel categories, and it was able to gather the vowel sounds into four categories more than 80 percent of the time. The report appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The next step is to determine if the program could deal with larger ensembles of sounds in a language, says McClelland. “That will definitely push the limits of the model, and from there we can gain even further insight into how the brain learns.”
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
The problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers.
Plug-in hybrids are often sold as a transition to EVs, but new data from Europe shows we’re still underestimating the emissions they produce.
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch
Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.
How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.