In this activity answer questions about two TED Talk lectures online; one by Pat
ID: 56292 • Letter: I
Question
In this activity answer questions about two TED Talk lectures online; one by Patricia Kuhl , co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington and one by MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy.
First watch (transcript also available) TED Talk by Patricia Kuhl, "The Linguistic Genius of Babies"
http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies
and answer the following questions:
(1) Summarize what Patricia Kuhl’s lab is studying?
(2) What do the Japanese and English and Mandarin and English experiments with babies demonstrate?
(3) What might the practical benefits of Patricia Kuhl’s research be? In other words, how might this kind of research help people?
Next, watch (transcript also available) TED Talk by Deb Roy, "The Birth of a Word"
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word?language=en 4
and answer the following questions:
(1) What do you think Deb Roy means by "feedback loops" in his discussion of his son’s language acquisition?
(2) What do you think Deb Roy means by the term wordscapes?
(3) In his talk, Deb Roy states:
"As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals."
What do you think might be some of the implications?
Explanation / Answer
(1) Summarize what Patricia Kuhl’s lab is studying?
Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition.
Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.Kuhl’s work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the brain. It has implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for developmental disabilities involving language, and for research on computer understanding of speech.
(2) What do the Japanese and English and Mandarin and English experiments with babies demonstrate?
Kuhl has proposed the Native Language Magnet/Neural Commitment Theory to account for the developmental change by which infants' ability to discriminate speech sounds becomes increasingly specific to their native language as they age. The model shows that infants use their computational abilities to "crack" the speech code and that infants' social skills play an important role in learning.
Studies of the phonetic units of language have shown that early in life, infants are capable of discerning differences among the phonetic units of all languages, including native- and foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and 12 mo of age, the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic units sharply declines. In two studies, investigated the necessary and sufficient conditions for reversing this decline in foreign-language phonetic perception. In Experiment 1, 9-mo-old American infants were exposed to native Mandarin Chinese speakers in 12 laboratory sessions. A control group also participated in 12 language sessions but heard only English. Subsequent tests of Mandarin speech perception demonstrated that exposure to Mandarin reversed the decline seen in the English control group. In Experiment 2, infants were exposed to the same foreign-language speakers and materials via audiovisual or audio-only recordings. The results demonstrated that exposure to recorded Mandarin, without interpersonal interaction, had no effect. Between 9 and 10 mo of age, infants show phonetic learning from live, but not prerecorded, exposure to a foreign language, suggesting a learning process that does not require long-term listening and is enhanced by social interaction.
By 6 mo, infants recognize native-language phonetic categories based on the distributional characteristics of the speech they hear. Between 6 and 8 mo, infants segment words from ongoing speech by detecting transitional probabilities between syllables and extract the arithmetic regularity of syllable combinations from sentences. At 9 mo of age, infants are sensitive to the phonotactic rules governing words, responding to the probability of occurrence of phonetic sequences. By the end of the first year of life, infants' perception of speech has been dramatically altered by exposure to their native language.
Kuhl explains that in one set of experiments, she compared a group of babies in America learning to differentiate the sounds “/Ra/” and “/La/,” with a group of babies in Japan. Between 6-8 months, the babies in both cultures recognized these sounds with the same frequency. However, by 10-12 months, after multiple training sessions, the babies in Seattle, Washington, were much better at detecting the “/Ra/-/La/” shift than were the Japanese babies.
(3) What might the practical benefits of Patricia Kuhl’s research be? In other words, how might this kind of research help people?
"that language learning begins in the womb" . As a fetus grows inside a mother's belly, it can hear sounds from the outside world—and can understand them well enough to retain memories of them after birth, according to new research. It may seem implausible that fetuses can listen to speech within the womb, but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last trimester of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother's abdomen.
Neural and behavioral research studies show that exposure to language in the first year of life influences the brain’s neural circuitry even before infants speak their first words. What do we know of the neural architecture underlying infants’ remarkable capacity for language and the role of experience in shaping that neural circuitry?
(1) What do you think Deb Roy means by "feedback loops" in his discussion of his son’s language acquisition?
So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- Deb roy, his wife and nanny -- were systematically and subconsciously restructuring language to meet the baby at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language along with environment. That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now.
(2) What do you think Deb Roy means by the term wordscapes?
Nanny offers water to the boy, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. And what we've done is use the word "water" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. We call these wordscapes. This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen.
(3) In his talk, Deb Roy states:
"As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals."
What do you think might be some of the implications?
We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content.We are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that we could never think with our biological memory. We can reconsturct the pages of gone life, the past, when we are passing the time in present for the future generations.