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Babies, language acquisition and the 'Babbler'.

Kiless

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Any speech / language pathologists or child development people out there?

I'm poking around on one of my foibles - language acquisition (currently doing some thinking about cultural interpretations of books, in particular two versions of the same children's book - one American English, the other Australian English) - and I found this.

Now, recalling from ESL training, that infants are born being able to differentiate between sounds but as they grow, unused neurons are 'pruned' and that removes the sounds they could otherwise learn and develop... which is why I have Japanese students having difficulties trying to disseminate between 'r' and 'l' because of the acoustics. I also recall being told that post-puberty it becomes more difficult to learn a new language.

Anyway - here's the toy (http://www.geniusbabies.com/genius-babies/babbyneurcom.html) and here's the pitch they have... and yes, I have seen the Penn and Teller "Bulls*it" ep on Mozart and Babies... so my skeptical antennae are quivering, don't you worry....


"The Babbler - Language Toy, by Neurosmith. The Babbler whispers sweet nothings that really mean something! When infants play with The Babbler (ages 1 month to 12 months), whimsical voices “babble” language sounds in Spanish, French and Japanese, while twinkling lights respond in different patterns.

Infants are born with an amazing capacity to distinguish all the sounds of the world’s languages. Only The Babbler is designed to enhance this natural gift, and provide infants with the foundation for successful language learning.

The Babbler is a washable “soft” smart toy, which features a head and chin that scrunch, arms that rattle, a nose that honks, and a teething handle. It also features a parent guide that explains the latest research in language development and linguistic theory.

[Whose, I wonder... I may contact them in regards to this....]


Infants are born with an amazing gift - the ability to perceive every sound in every language. Whether an infant is born in Paris or Pittsburgh, he or she can just as easily distinguish the different language sounds found in both French and English. Sometime between 8 and 10 months, infants start to lose their ability to perceive all the sounds of the world’s languages, as they begin to hone in on the sounds of their native language. Infants begin to group and organize the sounds of their native language forming a “language library” of sounds. If infants are exposed to only one language, their “language libraries” will contain just the sounds of that language. If they are exposed to the sounds of multiple languages, their libraries will be larger and include the new sounds as well. Once these unique “language libraries” have been built, infants can draw upon the information for their entire lives.

Why are these “language libraries” so important? The answer is the key to learning new languages fluently and with greater ease is this ability to hear sounds that are not found in a person’s native language. Amazingly enough, the window of opportunity to form these libraries is during a child’s first year of life. The Babbler enhances this natural gift of language by exposing infants to language sounds in Spanish, French and Japanese. Your baby will be entertained by the Babbler’s whimsical voices, but more important, your baby will receive the gift of successful language learning for the future."
 
The part about being able to discriminate phonemes from all the worl'd languages until 4 to 12 months of age seems to be true, but I am not sure the toy would work as advertized.
Werker, J. F., & Desjardins, R. N. (1995). Listening to speech in the 1rst year of life: Experiential influences on phoneme perception. Current Directions in Psychologiclal Science, 4 ,76-81.
 
I'm going on the memory of an impression here. I'll Google for confirmation later. But as best as I recall, the loss is not in hearing the sound (or the difference in sound), but in reproducing it. We just did not have the constant modeling of the proper way to form the foreign phonemes, and when we attempt it, it does feel or sound natural, so we revert to the closest equivalent in our native repertoire.

Asians can hear well and can learn to distinguish between an American's or European's use or the /r/ and /l/ phonemes. But because in their native languages, where there is just a single phoneme partway between the two, they have not practiced the European vocal positions, they end up using their native phoneme.

So since the Babbler does not model how to form the phoneme, nor do the sounds carry meaning, to engage the attention and imagination of the child, it will not teach him the foreign phonemes.

When I was young, there was a Spanish-language channel. My family did not know Spanish, but as a child I heard Spanish spoken because of that station -- even if I had no idea what was being said. In high school when I took Spanish it still took a lot of training and concentration to learn to approximate the /ñ/ , /ll/, and /rr/ phonemes and the Spanish version of the /r/ phoneme. And I never learned to speak without a very strong "NorteAmericano" accent.
 
Good point, Gwyn. That's one reason that I was wondering about the claim. I recall having difficulty reproducing phonemes in French, such as "eu". I could hear it, but not say it correctly.
Also, a device that just puts out sounds and doesn't interact with the infant has no opportunity to shape the sounds that the infant produces.
 
Since we have a kid with a severe speech disorder, I have made the acquaintence of lots of speech/language therapists and researchers. Including spending lots and lots of hours watching his therapy.

There are several different components that make up speech and language. They range from auditory perception to the mechanics of creating the speech (including the neuro connections in Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain... my son having had specific damage which prevented his brain from directing the proper muscles to move in the precise sequenses -- along with some language issues, dysphasia, and some muscle weakness, dysarthria).

It also looks like the "Babbler" is taking off from this kind of research: http://ilabs.washington.edu/kuhl/research.html ... and they more less probably first heard about on a PBS news report:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/youth/jan-june97/brain_5-29.html

My opinion is that something like the "Babbler" is a disigned to extract money from new parents who would be planning to put their kids into Wunderkind preschools so that they can be in the best schools and Harvard later on.

Someone exactly like ME... I who played German tapes to my baby only to find out later he had difficulty learning his own language. Ten years worth of speech therapy difficulty.

Truly a large lesson in humility.

We are much more relaxed with our younger kids.

All you really have to do is talk and interact with your baby (we did that with our FIRST also!!, yes, some "helpful" folks told us that was why he could not talk, even though he was communicating in sign language at age 3), and just be aware that there are a host of things that can go wrong. Speech and language issues are the #1 reason for special ed. intervention in schools.
 
Gwyn ap Nudd said:
I'm going on the memory of an impression here. I'll Google for confirmation later. But as best as I recall, the loss is not in hearing the sound (or the difference in sound), but in reproducing it. We just did not have the constant modeling of the proper way to form the foreign phonemes, and when we attempt it, it does feel or sound natural, so we revert to the closest equivalent in our native repertoire.

Asians can hear well and can learn to distinguish between an American's or European's use or the /r/ and /l/ phonemes. But because in their native languages, where there is just a single phoneme partway between the two, they have not practiced the European vocal positions, they end up using their native phoneme.
Click to expand...

I do not believe this to be correct. First, adults without special training typically have difficult in hearing phoneme contrasts that are not present in their native language. So, yes, you can train an adult Japanese speaker to distinguish /l/ and /r/, but without training, they will typically not hear a difference. (In fact, adult Japanese have difficulty "hearing" nonce words that don't fit the sound patterns of Japanese -- they will percieve /ebzo/ as /ebuzo/, and in fact be unable to distinguish the two at better than chance levels.) So it really does appear to be a perceptual issue. There's a good summary of some of this stuff in "Common Neural Basis for Phoneme Processing in Infants and Adults," Dehaene-Lambertz and Gliga J. Cogn. Neurosci..2004, to which you are referred.

But we can further demonstrate this by various infant studies that seem to show that the infants really do not hear the difference. Aside from the obvious brain-related studies (e.g. ERPs), simple habituation studies seem to show this. For example, bored infants suck more slowly. If you play the sounds /la/ /la/ /la/ /la/ ... over and over again, an infant will typically get bored after a while. If you suddenly change the sound, for example to /ra/ /ra/ /ra/ /ra/ the novelty of the stimulus will cause the infant to take notice and start sucking more rapidly.

That is, an English-speaking infant. A Japanese-"speaking" infant of the appropriate age literally will not notice the change in the stimulus.
 
Jeff Corey said:
May I have a reference on that? Psysearch didn't work .
Click to expand...

You should be able to find lots of references for "sucking"
and "habituation" on your favorite search engine.

Just offhand, here are some sites I found quickly.

From a French language acquisition lab

A set of Canadian psych lectures

A Canadian babylab

An American psych lecture describing the original HAS experiment

Unfortunately, the original experiment itself (Eimas, 1971) is so old I don't even have a copy to hand to confirm the reference; I believe it's from Science. But it's sort of passed into the realm of "common knowledge" among the appropriate specialists.

I should note that "non-nutritive sucking" is not the only method that people can use to for this sort of experiment; but it's one of the best for newborns. There are a number of other measures -- for example, preferential looking -- that are also used to measure when an infant has become habituated to a stimulus, and by extension, when an infant is perceptually aware of the novelty of a new
stimulus.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
All you really have to do is talk and interact with your baby (we did that with our FIRST also!!, yes, some "helpful" folks told us that was why he could not talk, even though he was communicating in sign language at age 3), and just be aware that there are a host of things that can go wrong. Speech and language issues are the #1 reason for special ed. intervention in schools.
Click to expand...

Thanks to all, this was pretty much what I expected... is there research in the use of 'sign language for babies' (a book I saw advertised on Amazon.com)?
 
You should understand that the use of sign language was introduced by a speech/language therapist to reduce the frustration of a toddler who could not produce speech. She also had us use a picture communicaton notebook -- which was discarded because signing was easier.

After his first 5 months of therapy starting when he was 2 1/4 years old he had a 70 sign vocabulary. Assisted by a couple of Sesame Street books on sign language (the more useful one is out of print, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/039484212X/ ).

(Side note: In the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus" where his toddler son is on the kitchen floor screaming and kicking because he cannot communicate what he wants --- that scene occured in our house more than once. Even though our son can hear, he could not speak. Interestingly... the special ed. program he entered at age three was offshoot from the district's hard of hearing program after they kept getting kids who could not speak, but could hear).

Some kids with his disability sometimes gravitate towards using the pictures (PECS - Picture Exchange Communication System) because they have problems with fine motor skills.

I checked on the the American Speech and Hearing Association's website for liturature... and there is some, but it is mostly restricted to members:
http://search.asha.org/query.html?col=asha&col=ashfoun&col=nsslha&qt="sign%20language"

There seem to be a couple that if you can get to a university library that subscribes to their journal that might be worth a look at:
Gesture Development: A Review for Clinical and Research Practices (Members Only. Register here.)
The aim of this article is to provide clinicians and researchers a comprehensive overview of the development and functions of gesture in childhood and in select populations with developmental language impairments. Of ...
http://www.asha.org/members/deskref-journals/journals/jslhr/47/01/ jsl47010173.htm - 105.5KB - ASHA Web Site PublicationDate: February 2004
SeriesName: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Click to expand...

and
Language and Gesture in Late Talkers: A 1-Year Follow-up (Members Only. Register here.)
A 1-year follow-up of relationships between language and symbolic gesture in 10 children with delayed onset of early lexical skills (Thal & Bates, 1988a) is reported. Original data are reevaluated in light of new ...
http://www.asha.org/members/deskref-journals/journals/jshr/34/03/ jshr34030604.htm - 35.8KB - ASHA Web Site PublicationDate: June 1991
SeriesName: Journal of Speech and Hearing Research
Click to expand...

I tried http://scholar.google.com, but it created too many hits -- many of them related to deaf and hard of hearing children.

Anecdote alert: From my own experience it has been handy to have a cursery knowledge of sign language with all three kids. There are certain signs that are good for emphasis, like STOP! Also, I can communicate with them when I am on the phone or in a crowded place. My brother was amused when I had a silent arguement with one child on the issue of whether or not he could go into a shopping center play area. He would sign "yes" and I would sign "no" --- back and forth.
 
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