EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION CRACKING THE

EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: CRACKING THE SPEECH CODE Patricia Kuhl

Recent data and theory posit that language learning is grounded in children’s appreciation of others’ communicative inten- tions, their sensitivity to joint visual attention and their desire to imitate77.

To test whether such learning depends on live human interaction, a new group of infants saw the same Mandarin speakers on a television screen or heard them over loudspeakers (FIG. 4a). The auditory statistical cues available to the infants were identical in the televised and live settings, as was the use of ‘motherese’78,79 (BOX 4). If simple auditory exposure to language prompts learning, the presence of a live human being would not be essen- tial. However, the infants’ Mandarin discrimination scores after exposure to televised or audiotaped speakers were no greater than those of the control infants; both groups differed significantly from the live-exposure group (FIG. 4c). Infants are apparently not computational automatons — rather, they might need a social tutor when learning natural language.

The extent to which other forms of learning (eg. concept formation) are related to social discourse in this way 

Study idea: Do gaze-following in tracking how artifacts are passed around!