A Psycho-Linguistics subject

1. Lecturer: Dr. Safaie
Presented by: L.A. Rad
April 2017
Babies Birth
Language

2.  It used to be thought that babies,
before they were born, did little
more than lay back and mature.
 This view of the unborn baby as a
passive, inhabitant of an isolation
tank is certainly wrong.
 babies are remarkably responsive
to the external stimulation.

3.  No one doubts that babies are
good at learning.
 They are capable of learning even
a few hours after birth.
 There is also evidence to suggest
that they can learn before birth.
This is hardly surprising.
 The ability to learn does not
suddenly switched on at birth. Just
when it develops is unknown.
A special pacifier helped researchers study
how newborns respond to different vowel
sounds. Scientists propose that babies
start to recognize language before birth.

4.  What babies hear is more like the sound that you get
from covering your mouth with your hand and talking
through that.
 Only frequencies up to about 1000 Hz get through to
the baby. If you could only hear frequencies up to
1000 Hz, you would recognize the tune of a well
known song because of the changing pitch, rhythm…
but you would be unable to make out the individual
words or even the individual sounds; they would be
too muffled.
The nature of the
sounds for the
babies

5.  Intonation (variation in pitch) and
rhythm are properties of a language
which may differ from a language to
another.
 They are also properties of the
language to which babies are exposed
very early, primarily in the form of the
mother's voice, which travels through
bone and tissue to the uterus and,
although still muffled, is louder than
any speech sounds coming in from the
outside.
 The only variation in the language that
the baby has exposure to before it is
born is generally referred to as prosodic
variation, the variation in pitch,
loudness, duration and so on.
On babies' sensitivity
to rhythm and intonation

6. What information is contained in the lower frequency
range which the baby could learn and which would also be
useful?

7.  Based on a research, in the mid-1980s, headed
by Jacques Mehler demonstrated that very
young babies (just four days old) already know
enough about their own language to be able to
tell it apart from another language.
 Why should the baby want to distinguish
between languages? It does not. If babies are
sufficiently sensitive to changes in the prosodic
characteristics of the speech they hear, it
follows that they should be able to distinguish
between speech exhibiting different prosodic
characteristics.
 And if the speech from two languages differs
with respect to prosody, then babies should be
able to distinguish between the languages.
What researches
indicate

8. What did Mehler do?
 Speech from one language (French) was played to four-day-old babies each time
they sucked on their teat until they habituated that is, until the novelty wore off
and they started to suck less.
 Once their sucking rate fell below some pre-determined amount speech from
another language (Russian) was played to them each time they sucked (the
speech was recorded from a single French-Russian bilingual speaker so that the
voice characteristics remained the same).
 Mehler found that the babies, all of whom had French-speaking parents, sucked
more when the different language was played to them (because of the novelty of
this new stimulus, the infants had dis-habituated. If the language was changed
after the babies had habituated, they sucked faster. If the language did not
change, they sucked the same.
 In a related experiment, Mehler and his colleagues wanted to be sure that the
babies were not simply discriminating between the languages on the basis of the
different sounds that they use. So they artificially simulated the kinds of speech
that the babies would have heard in utero, and gave the babies just the prosodic
content of each language. But still the babies could distinguish between them.

9. http://ilabs.washington.edu/i-labs-ne...
In this video, a newborn in
Sweden is listening to an
English vowel; after long
pause in sucking, the vowel
is changed.
The number of sucking
responses to each vowel is
an indicator of the degree
of interest or preference an
infant has for a particular
sound.

10.  Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between
sounds from their native language and a foreign
language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates
that babies begin absorbing language while still in the
womb, earlier than previously thought.
 Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed
at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows
that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk
during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can
demonstrate what they’ve heard.
 Again babies’ interest in the sounds was captured by how
long they sucked on a pacifier that was wired into a
computer measuring the babies’ reaction to the sounds.
In both countries, the babies at birth sucked longer for
the foreign language than they did for their native
tongue.
 The researchers say that infants are the best learners,
and discovering how they soak up information could give
insights on lifelong learning. “We want to know what
magic they put to work in early childhood that adults
cannot,” Kuhl said. “We can’t waste that early curiosity.”
January 2, 2013
While in womb,
babies begin
learning language
from their mothers
Molly McElroy News and Information

12.  If you move countries and forget your birth language, you retain
this hidden ability, according to a study.
 Dutch-speaking adults adopted from South Korea exceeded
expectations at Korean pronunciation when retrained after losing
their birth language.
 Dr Jiyoun Choi of Hanyang University in Seoul led the research.
 The study is the first to show that the early experience of adopted
children in their birth language gives them an advantage decades
later even if they think it is forgotten, she said.
 ''This finding indicates that useful language knowledge is laid down
in [the] very early months of life, which can be retained without
further input of the language and revealed via re-learning,'' she told
BBC News.
 The process of acquiring language starts extremely early, even
while the child is still in the womb.
The research is published in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.
Babies
remember
their birth
language -
scientists
By Helen Briggs BBC News
18 January 2017
Once more!

13.  It is generally agreed that the
auditory system, or the sense of
hearing, is functional by around
seven months.
 The baby is immersed in fluid,
surrounded by membranes,
muscle, and skin. Much of the
sound around the mother never
even passes through, and what
little gets through is distorted by
all that tissue and fluid.
 Because the sounds that the baby
hears in utero are the first sounds
it hears, they may kick-start the
whole process which leads to the
ability to interpret and recognize
different sounds.
Nature of the
sound is
important
Therefore
Understanding
the distortion is
essential
what magic
they put to
work needs to
be discussed

14. How do we begin to communicate? No matter the culture
or language, we all go through these same stages.

15. Thanks for your attention!