Medical Xpress has a report (no author named) on how “Speech rhythm and pitch are fundamental in babies’ language acquisition”:
Language acquisition is a complex process that requires different neural and cognitive skills since early childhood. One of children’s big challenges in language learning is to distinguish the words that are grammatically linked to each other, even though they hear one word after the other.
We can easily understand that in the sentence “She, who never drinks coffee, sleeps more,” “she” is the subject to the verb “sleep,” just like in the—easier—sentence “She sleeps well,” although the first sentence has many words in between the subject and the verb. However, how does a child’s brain cope with having to find regularities between the words that are separated from one another in a sentence? Since there are many words that could go together, it seems impossible to keep track of them all.
To date, it was thought that babies could not recognize these distant regularities in speech signal until their first year of life. Now, a study published in the journal Science Advances reveals that 9-month-old babies are sensitive to non-adjacent grammatical regularities contained in language components. The conclusions of the study highlight the importance of prosody—rhythm, melodic stress, pitch, pauses, etc.—that eases the babies’ language learning process.
The study is led by Ruth de Diego Balaguer and Ferran Pons, lecturers at the Faculty of Psychology and the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBneuro). Researchers Anna Martínez Álvarez and Judit Gervain, from the University of Padova (Italy), participated in the study as well.
The study itself is here; I find this stuff fascinating, and I look forward to follow-ups. Thanks, Bonnie!
Yet more Electric Phrenology!
I may have missed something, but it looks like the study should be called “Speech rhythm and pitch are fundamental in babies’ language acquisition in French.” It is possible that the researchers are unaware that speech rhythm and pitch behave differently in different languages.
However, I am not astonished to be told that if you strip information from spoken language, babies find it harder to process.
I suppose it is a bit interesting that they suppose that they have demonstrated this even in a language which does not have lexical or morphological tone or lexical or morphological contrastive stress; but of course, that just means that in French, tone, stress and (naturally enough) pauses are matters determined by syntax, because that’s all that’s left. But their supposed insights into babies’ learning of syntax, specifically, probably result from their having picked a languages in which that is all that suprasegmental features actually do.
Re: the authors, this is the original paper
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4083
Speech rhythm and pitch are fundamental in adults’ language, too. I wish all syntactical theories, descriptions, and texts integrated prosody right from the beginning.
Amen to that. As we’ve often noted, many of the Chomskyans’ supposedly “ungrammatical” sentences are perfectly grammatical with the right prosody; their neglect of which is surely attributable to the fact that the defective English writing system provides only minimal information about it.
I strongly suspect that the study of focus phenomena would be considerably more advanced if it hadn’t been for the fact that, in the mother tongue of so many syntacticians, they are largely marked by intonation and ignored in the orthography.
And while I’m on a complaining jag: don’t you just hate it when the writers of grammars of tone languages decide that they’re not going to mark tone throughout? I mean, why don’t you just go ahead and omit the damn vowels, too, while you’re about it? Eh?
… omit the damn vowels, too,
[segments] They’ve a temper some of them — particularly consonants: they’re the proudest — vowels you can do anything with, but not consonants — however I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!
[Channeling Humpty Dumpty, and contra the claim on another thread that English children’s literature doesn’t exhibit grammatical nonsense.]
@all
When some of babies I know babble, they often use adult intonations (and syllables ba-ma-pa).
Do other have a similar impression?
Interestingly, a 2019 article at that site titled The amazing baby brain says ‘pas de problème’ with bilingualism refers to another article from 2016 entitled Bilingualism alters children’s frontal lobe functioning for attentional control, which has the following summary:
Bilingualism is a typical linguistic experience, yet relatively little is known about its impact on children’s cognitive and brain development. Theories of bilingualism suggest that early dual-language acquisition can improve children’s cognitive abilities, specifically those relying on frontal lobe functioning. While behavioral findings present much conflicting evidence, little is known about its effects on children’s frontal lobe development. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the findings suggest that Spanish–English bilingual children (n = 13, ages 7–13) had greater activation in left prefrontal cortex during a non-verbal attentional control task relative to age-matched English monolinguals. In contrast, monolinguals (n = 14) showed greater right prefrontal activation than bilinguals. The present findings suggest that early bilingualism yields significant changes to the functional organization of children’s prefrontal cortex for attentional control and carry implications for understanding how early life experiences impact cognition and brain development.
Sound familiar?
Back to our article on Speech rhythm and pitch…, the article appears to be circling around one of the mysteries of Chomskyan theory, namely, that the ability to embed is the secret to human linguistic ability. Basically, language is not just a string of elements, it is a structured string of elements. The ability to pick up and interpret structures (typically tree structures) is what distinguishes us from lesser creatures. Is this article shoring up the Chomskyan position, or is it, au contraire stripping away the mystery.
I doubt whether this sort of stuff has much value for proving or disproving anything at all, but I would interpret it as undermining Chomsky’s Poverty of Stimulus argument. Not that that needs much undermining these days, having been basically thoroughly debunked to the satisfaction of all but Chomsky cultists.
@DE: You will likely appreciate the orthography of the (Gbeya) Suma Dictionary put online by Raymond Boyd (earlier at CNRS).
https://www.rblanguesdafrique.info/suma2.html
https://www.rblanguesdafrique.info/intro_.pdf
Page vii of the introduction lists alphabetical order for Suma, with 16 varieties of each of the 7 vowels (short, long, oral, nasal, three tones in various combinations), which follow the 31 consonants.
My late brother worked with two longtime Suma-speaking friends from northern CAR to compile most of the documentation that Boyd organized. Boyd credits them.
That’s actually been studied – and the finding was that the intonation of baby babbling is specifically that of the language the babies are exposed to. I don’t think cases with more than one language were studied.
Not only is the stimulus not as poor as Chomsky thought, it starts earlier.
You will likely appreciate the orthography of the (Gbeya) Suma Dictionary
Indeed yes (and while not marking tones everywhere in a grammar is merely very annoying, not marking tones in a dictionary, at least in headwords, is a positive dereliction of duty.)
I don’t think using tone in alphabetisation is a particularly brilliant idea though. Not unless the language has no tone sandhi at all: and even then …
But then I’m not a great fan of treating digraphs as separate unitary “letters”, either, as certain dictionaries of Oti-Volta languages do, even to the point of e.g. listing ‘baa’ after ‘bas.’ (And even though Welsh dictionaries do.)
If lexicographers want to express their linguistic purity of heart, they should pick a way that doesn’t make things gratuitously difficult for us groundlings.
Nice dictionary.
Incidentally, it reminds me that Gbeya has its tones upside down compared to e.g. proto-Bantu etc, with e.g. tè “tree” and nú “mouth” – just like Western Oti-Volta.
Oh, it sounds just like Bokoto,
Yes it does, and it looks just like Bokoto,
Yes it does, and it’s mutually intelligible with Bokoto, pretty much,
But its tones are just like Western Oti-Volta.
@DM, aha, thank you!
I suspected that it could have been studied if my observation was accurate, but I didn’t know if it is something every parent knows or just wrong.
If you remember any text that references such studies, I’d gladly read them.
That’s actually been studied – and the finding was that the intonation of baby babbling is specifically that of the language the babies are exposed to.
Yes, babies I know use Russian intonation:)
Once in a supermarket in San Diego, ca. 1980, I passed two people speaking Spanish (not at all remarkable in SD, of course), and an Anglo baby in a nearby cart immediately started babbling at them with perfect Spanish intonation (I assume she heard Spanish in public as often as I did).
There was a popular video of toddler twins babbling with each other some years ago, demonstrating that they had already acquired American English intonation (along with gesture, facial expressions, and conversational turn-taking) before integrating any* actual words into it. See discussion e.g. at Sentence first. It gives me an uncanny-valley feeling, as I keep expecting to hear it as language.
*Almost any. As the speech pathologist linked from Sentence first points out, one or both says “up” while lifting a foot.
omit the damn vowels, too
and then they get so mad at you when you try to put them in!
Indeed …
Actually, in Africa (at any rate) it’s quite often the actual speakers who object to the incorporation of tone marking into standard orthography, usually on pretty good grounds, at that; e.g. it’s not necessary for L1 speakers, so it would just make writing gratuitously difficult, with no benefit to the actual users; or (sadly all too often) the tone system has not been adequatety analysed, so even if you really wanted to mark tone, it wouldn’t actually be feasible to do so consistently..
(I can’t see English speakers enthusiastically embracing any proposal to routinely mark the four contrastive stress levels or the contrastive intonation contours, either, integral though they are to the actual spoken language. Same reasons …)
None of that excuses leaving it out of grammars and dictionaries, though.
(I can’t see English speakers enthusiastically embracing any proposal to routinely mark the four contrastive stress levels or the contrastive intonation contours, either, integral though they are to the actual spoken language. Same reasons …)
None of that excuses leaving it out of grammars and dictionaries, though.
Lots of things are integral to lots of things. That’s no reason to push the whole caboodle in people’s faces at every opportunity.
Grammars and dictionaries were traditionally tied hand and foot by the fact that they are printed. Every time some one discovered new integral stuff, it had to be integrated as print. Thus footnotes and IPA, editions and commentaries.
Sometimes pictures were added to the lemmas, or a cassette or CD included with conversations to exemplify pronunciation and grammar-in-action. But the whole business was still hampered by weight and volume. You had to wait for new volumes aka editions.
Now there are multimedia grammars and dictionaries in the ‘net. Accent marks and vowel pointings can (in principle) be made to be turned on and off to suit every peever. In video clips you see and hear customers bringing in les plumes de ses tantes for repairs, with contrastive intonation contours of choice – Paris, Marseille. Youtube has it.
The media are the message. Get with the program, folks. Lose that ugly weight, mute the volume.
Get with the program
I blame the Agricultural Revolution. Never used to see grammars or dictionaries without tone marking before that. Bloody kids nowadays …
Which Agricultural Revolution do you mean ? None of them went far enough, in my opinion. We’re still eating shoots and leaving the rest to litter the forests primeval.
Therefore, 9-month-old babies can be sensitive to non-adjacent grammatical regularities, but reaching a strong and reliable learning in this age range is only possible when there is a statistical and prosodic regularity in the speech, elements that help the child’s brain detect the grammatical blocks that form a non-adjacent dependency.
“non-adjacent” is a peculiar word here. Prosody overlays sequences of words, and so in one sense is as adjacent to them as can be – just like noise in the environment. I also can’t figure out in what sense “grammatical blocks” – sequences of words – are “non-adjacent dependencies”.
But dependency of what on what ? What is adjacent to what? Are they referring to “sequences of words” ? That’s a temporal, not a physical adjacency – for the observers, not the babies.
Are “non-adjacent” and “dependency” being used here as linguistic terms of art ?
The Catalan version here uses words cognate with the English ones cited in Medical Xpress – una dependència no adjacent.
This is the kind of paper that unblushingly states as a truism “the possible candidates for a nonadjacent dependency are theoretically infinite”, which is of course only true in the sense that “a sentence is theoretically infinite” is true (and even then, wouldn’t necessarily be true, unless a word could be grammatically dependent on another word spoken any arbitrary number of centuries previously in that same sentence.) This vacuous statement is the sort of thing that passes for a supporting argument in this kind of paper.
“Computing regularities over linguistic units” (an activity ascribed to babies) is also a warning of what we’re in for … we’re in Chomskyland.
Whether it’s worth trying to extract meaning from this sort of thing is questionable, but FWIW the stuff about non-adjacent dependences only makes sense here if they mean “syntactic dependences.” This is simply equivalent (in the case of this study) to the question of how listeners divide up strings of words into phrases correctly: nobody who gives that matter a second’s thought would be surprised to hear that prosodic cues might just be a leetle helpful there in quite a number of languages – and certainly in all familiar SAE languages.
There are languages that do actual discontinuous constituents (and where prosodic cues will give the “wrong answer”) but I suspect that these researchers are entirely unaware of all that, and worse yet, wouldn’t care if you told them about it anyway. Chomsky Himself has shown the Way: ignore all data that doesn’t fit. It’s the Galilean Method!
Chomsky: The Man of Galilee
… the question of how listeners divide up strings of words into phrases correctly: nobody who gives that matter a second’s thought would be surprised to hear that prosodic cues might just be a leetle helpful there in quite a number of languages – and certainly in all familiar SAE languages.
That’s what I had imagined anyway. It seems I got distracted by various words deployed in that study to demonstrate that something is the case which I would not have denied was the case, if anyone had cased me for an opinion.
Chomsky: The Man of Galilee
That is indeed his belief.
to demonstrate that something is the case which I would not have denied was the case, if anyone had asked
Quite so. I doubt whether their study is well-enough designed to demonstrate what they purport to be showing, but the conclusions seem entirely obvious anyway to anybody who realises that prosody is actually a vital meaningful part of spoken language. Probably, anybody except a Chomskyite who thinks exclusively in terms of “investigating” language via making up written sentences and deciding if they are “grammatical” by introspection.
This discussion has gotten me thinking that maybe people have the wrong computing metaphor for language. Chomsky (most of all, but probably all modern linguists to at least some extent) often relates language use and acquisition to a computational coding-decoding, a programming problem. Maybe we should instead think of natural language learning from a systems administration perspective. Trying to build the lexical and grammatical knowledge needed to communicate in a language by observing fluent users in action, one faces an enormous “dependency hell” problem. One needs to know the meaning, at least approximately, of lots of other linguistic items in order to infer the meanings of new ones. So maybe the mind executes a kind of randomized algorithm, tentatively installing, and if necessary uninstalling, meaning modules to see if they make it possible to install additional useful meaning modules.
Testing hypotheses.
Yes indeed. That is exactly what language-acquiring children are doing when they overgeneralise: “I seed two sheeps.”
You know, you don’t have to cater to Welsh stereotypes 😉
I’m sorry … I don’t understand ….
It’s the sheeps, Dafydd.
Not to be confused with Dafad.
No, just not getting it, sorry.
If you’re not getting “cater to Welsh stereotypes”, I think Hans was joking about your using sheeps=ships in your example of overgeneralizing, where the stereotype would be that Wales is synonymous with sheep.
At first, I thought the joke was about your exclamation “A nos mouton!” But that’s not even in this thread.
You guys lay off David, he’s my favorite Calvinist. There’s another good reason for caution: According to The New York Times, a Calvinist revival is sweeping through modern American evangelicalism. [2014] They’re only colonials, but they’re on your block.
Wales and sheep? Really? I never heard of such a thing.
I did see a sheep in England once. At least, I think so. I’m really only familiar with their pictures in books. It may have been a hairy cow.
@Stu:
Hey, the NYT says that I belong to a “retro-chic religious movement”! I just knew that if I hung on long enough I’d be fashionable one day. Perhaps I will keep this jacket after all …
A sheep jacket is always in fashion.
I haven’t had one for decades. In stores here you find only skimpy swishy confections. Guess I’ll have to order a real one from Texas or Scotland.
Moutons, not mouton, of course.
L’esprit de la seizième minute.
My wife overloaded her iphone storage with pics of sheep when we walked the Welsh coastal path near Dinas Head. But in retrospect they were likely English sheep on holiday.