How babies and young children learn to understand language

Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses.

Statistical learning --and there are studies about this-- is also obvious when multi-lingual kids make up words that do not exists.

They'll use words from one of the language they know to come up with words (or words beginning / ending) in another language. These words, statistically, could make sense. And they'll pronounce them "properly". Yet they don't exist.

So it's not just the words: it's the pronunciation too.

As the father of a fully bilingual kid (french / english) that was fascinating to watch.

> Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alone their meaning.

My experience learning French basically. I'd say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.

It's good that they mentioned babies hearing in the womb. I've known many mothers that read to or play music for their babies. They say they feel them respond to some things, too, where they seem to sense their surroundings. I'm just reporting what they told me since I haven't studied the literature on this stuff.

One thing I didn't like was the paragraph on how they differentiate words with no formal training. I feel that gives a false impression. Parents usually teach their children a lot about language. They give them visual cues, speak at varying rates, change their own tone in some situations, and so on.

The babies are soaking up the world on their own using one set of mechanisms. They also often receive highly-supervised training from a trusted source. Later, they get formal training on top of that. Even when not training, much of the content they see and hear is presented in a structured way that helps connect ideas. For instance, listening to the radio or TV with their parents would let them hear a lot of structured speech.

Babies are highly trained. They might also do the statistical learning. They're a mix of the two.

The article starts getting good in the last 2 paragraphs, explaining the actual science of observed transitional probabilities, then it suddenly stops.

Its almost as if the writer ran out of coffee, or his scientific mind went on strike. What was that ?

Tip for parents - teach your babies Sign Language. They can communicate with you much earlier than they can learn to talk clearly. So much easier when a baby can tell you they're all done or want more than to have to figure that out without communication.

Does anyone here have direct experience raising multilingual kids? Specifically the situation where one partner speaks English natively and the other speaks two languages natively? For sake of example, let's say they're German and Spanish. (And you want the child to learn all three natively.)

My plan is to divide the languages by person and place:

- always talk to Parent 1 in English, no matter the location

- talk to Parent 2 in Spanish at home and German when outside the home, adhering strictly to this location-based method. The extended family mostly speaks Spanish, which makes the "home" association stronger.

This seems easier to me than dividing the languages by time (only speak Spanish on M/W/F, German on Tu/Th/Sat) or other divisions, but I'm open to any suggestions.

I learnt German at the age of 25.

I distinctly remember the first time I was exposed to it (before learning it), it sounded like water gently flowing down a creek. Then I learnt the basics, and my brain started to catch on to patterns.

However, I had to go through the written form to learn properly. I found it hard to parse and remember words when I was only hearing them. Unlike young children, obviously.

Chomsky describes why the word identification method described in the article can’t work in English (though a more elaborate method is one of the few successes he knows in applying statistical methods to language): https://youtu.be/92GOS1VIGxY

The arguments against universal grammar are no good either: For example even though children may hear lots of examples it isn’t nearly enough to derive a hierarchical grammar. It also doesn’t explain why language is hierarchical (just like it doesn’t explain why we can’t speak and hear like a modem)

> When we write, we leave spaces between words. Readingwordswithoutsuchspacesisdifficult.

immediately losing credibility because quite a number of languages, such as Chinese and Japanese (and I think Korean too), are written without space between words or characters. In fact, until quite recently (last 100 years or so), written Chinese had no punctuations.

I believe it doesn't start with an explicit attempt to identify words, but from the attempt to compress the sound into fewest meaningful dimensions, and the words naturally result from it. It's a low level process that creates these words, as well as the apparent boundaries.

I've always been curious whether learning a second language from childhood has a positive or negative impact on a child's development.

Related, but I'm currently reading "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain", it's fascinating!

Makes sense, perhaps this is also why nursery rhymes chop up words into syllables following the melody.

> Just think how you pronounce the syllable ham when referring to a piece of meat and when talking about a fury animal—a long ham and a short ham-ster.

Hang on. Y'all pronounce these differently? I've lived in four U.S. regions and have a pretty generic middle-American accent and I'm having trouble even thinking what the distinction might be.

I gave up trying to read this after closing the 3rd popup

What a silly question to ask. They learn by training on the entire web, hiding one word at a time.

/s