Friday, October 26, 2007

Language abilities in infants

After reading the articles about language in this set of articles I have attempted to understand the articles alone but also to understand ways in which they might connect. The first article “left hemisphere specialization…” conducted a study in which they observed the asymmetry of babies’ mouths while the babbled. The researchers determined that when babies babbled the right side of their mouth was opened wider suggesting that the left hemisphere was more active. When I read this I found that it was compelling, yet I was left with questions. One question that I was left with was if they considered doing brain imaging to determine exactly which areas of the brain were working, and if these were known language centers. The researchers believed that babbling was somehow an exercise in speech articulation. It seems as though this can relate to the research about second languages. Babbling does not necessarily sound like any sort of language. Perhaps babbling is just preparing babies to say a multitude of different words or even different languages. It would be interesting if research was done to examine if babies utilize different phones from different languages in their babbling or if they simply utilized sounds that they commonly heard. Perhaps children who are exposed to different phones from different languages would be able to articulate these better if they were able to have this exposure during the babbling phase. The “Critical periods…” paper maintains that there seems to be a critical period for second language acquisition, where it is easier for people to learn another language. I wonder if part of this critical period is the babbling phase in which babies are able to practice articulating different sounds that may not be part of the English language but another language. Perhaps another reason why babies are better at learning a second language at a young age has to do with “statistical learning” techniques that may be stronger or more prevalent in infants than adults, or that children may rely on more than adults. Perhaps due to perceptual narrowing this ability is somewhat compromised in adults. Children are able to use this technique to learn words in almost any language because there is consistency in the way words are formed in all kinds of languages. Perhaps as we get older we rely on our already existing word bank or specific combinations or rules for the ways in which words are formed and thus do not have to rely on this technique therefore it is somewhat lost. This “statistical learning” technique also seems to be highly related to mathematical abilities which suggests that perhaps babies innately have some mathematical abilities. It would be interesting to do imaging studies to determine the extent of these mathematical abilities in language comprehension. These different concepts are all really interesting when considering them in terms of one aspect of language but when you consider how they relate to each other you begin to see how language recognition, comprehension and production are related in interesting and complex ways. a

No comments: