NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Babies who are just starting to pick up language learn to tease out words from the constant noise surrounding them by discovering properties that distinguish words from other sounds, new research reveals.

Dr. Linda B. Smith and Eliana Colunga of Indiana University in Bloomington found that children learn to expect words to be emitted only from the human mouth, but understand that noises deemed to be animal sounds--such as "moo" or "woof"--can come from a variety of sources.

These results may help researchers understand why certain children have trouble learning language, the team suggests. In some cases, babies appear slow to pick up language because they seem to only understand words in certain contexts--such as in a certain room, or when spoken by their mothers.

These children may have been unable to let go of a set of criteria associated with words that do not always help them distinguish words from other noises, Smith suggested.

Smith told Reuters Health that babies are constantly surrounded by noise and other phenomena that direct their attention toward objects, from which they have to learn to distinguish the name of the object, such as "cat" or "ice cream."

The findings from the current study demonstrate that babies learn to pick out the words from noise by learning what properties always apply to words--for instance, they always come out of a human's mouth. In contrast, she noted, animal sounds can come from a variety of sources: humans, the animal itself, or even a toy.

"If kids are picking up on this systematically, they should be able to figure out it's the words coming out of my mouth," Smith explained. "We think these kids are sort of on their way to having the idea that we have of what is a word," she added.

Smith and Colunga base their findings on a series of experiments with 24 children aged 20 to 26 months. During the experiments, the investigators presented the children with two toy animals, using a new sound to name the objects with which the child was not yet familiar.

Specifically, the researchers tried to name the object using the word "toma," the buzz of a motor, or the sound made by a frog. For instance, when using the word toma, the experimenters tried to familiarize the babies to the object by speaking the sentence: "Look at this toma. Wow! See this toma? Look! Toma."

Smith and Colunga then asked the children to pick out the object they had just been introduced to from two presented to them on a tray, after the investigators repeated the sentence the babies had first heard about the object. However, in some instances, the sentences were produced by a noisemaker.

The investigators found that children were much more likely to pick out the object when the sentence including the word "toma" was spoken to them, than when they heard the sentence produced by a noisemaker. In contrast, when the researchers used sentences containing either the animal or motor sound, the babies appeared to be equally capable of picking out the object, whether the sentence was spoken aloud or produced by the noisemaker.

They presented their findings on Saturday at the Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Fairfax, Virginia.

In an interview with Reuters Health, Smith explained that babies learn over time which properties best distinguish words from other noises. She noted that if these experiments had been performed on younger babies, the babies may have associated words to other aspects that often accompany words but do not distinguish them, such as finger pointing, or other hand gestures. This would indicate that the babies had not yet identified the properties that distinguish words from other noises in practically all situations.

Furthermore, she noted that understanding the fundamental properties by which babies learn language may help researchers figure out how to build a machine that could do the same.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".