How Bilinguals Switch Between Languages

Individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate "sound systems" for each language, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona.

"A lot of research has shown that bilinguals are pretty good at accommodating speech variation across languages, but there's been a debate as to how," 

"There are two views: One is that bilinguals have different processing modes for their two languages -- they have a mode for processing speech in one language and then a mode for processing speech in the other language. Another view is that bilinguals just adjust to speech variation by recalibrating to the unique acoustic properties of each language."

The study looked at 32 Spanish-English early bilinguals, who had learned their second language before age 8. Participants were presented with a series of pseudo-words beginning with a 'pa' or a 'ba' sound and asked to identify which of the two sounds they heard.

While 'pa' and 'ba' sounds exist in both English and Spanish, how those sounds are produced and perceived in the two languages varies subtly. In the case of 'ba,' for example, English speakers typically begin to vibrate their vocal chords the moment they open their lips, while Spanish speakers begin vocal chord vibration slightly before they open their lips and produce 'pa' in a manner similar to English 'ba.' As a result of those subtle differences, English-only speakers might, in some cases, confuse the 'ba' and 'pa' sounds they hear in Spanish, explains co-author Andrew Lotto, associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona.

"When most people think about differences between languages, they think they use different words and they have different grammars, but at their base languages use different sounds," Lotto said.

"One of the reasons it sounds different when you hear someone speaking a different language is because the actual sounds they use are different; they have a sound code that's specific to that language," he said. "One of the reasons someone might sound like they have an accent if they learn Spanish first is because their 'pa' is like an English 'ba,' so when they say a word with 'pa,' it will sound like a 'ba' to an English monolingual."

For the study, the bilingual participants were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be hearing rare words in Spanish, while the other was told they would be hearing rare words in English. Both groups heard audio recordings of variations of the same two words -- bafri and pafri -- which are not real words in either language.

Participants were then asked to identify whether the words they heard began with a 'ba' or a 'pa' sound.

Each group heard the same series of words, but for the group told they were hearing Spanish, the ends of the words were pronounced slightly differently, with the 'r' getting a Spanish pronunciation.

The findings: Participants perceived 'ba' and 'pa' sounds differently depending on whether they were told they were hearing Spanish words, with the Spanish pronunciation of 'r,' or whether they were told they were hearing English words, with the English pronunciation of 'r.'

"What this showed is that when you put people in English mode, they actually would act like English speakers, and then if you put them in Spanish mode, they would switch to acting like Spanish speakers," Lotto said. "These bilinguals, hearing the exact same 'ba's and 'pa's would label them differently depending on the context."

When the study was repeated with 32 English monolinguals, participants did not show the same shift in perception; they labeled 'ba' and 'pa' sounds the same way regardless of which language they were told they were hearing. It was that lack of an effect for monolinguals that provided the strongest evidence for two sound systems in bilinguals.

"If you learn a second language later in life, you usually have a dominant language and then you try to use that sounds system for the other language, which is why you end up having an accent," he said.

"This raises the possibility that bilinguals can perceive speech like a native speaker in both languages," said Gonzales, whose own son is growing up learning English and Chinese simultaneously.

"The predominant view of late has been that bilinguals will never be able to perceive a second language beyond what a late learner is capable of, or someone who learns a second language late in life. So even if you learn two languages simultaneously from birth, you're always going to perceive one of them like a late learner," Gonzales said. "Our findings cast doubt on that prominent view in the bilingual literature."

Mamihlapinatapai

Derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered^[who?] one of the hardest words to translate.

A slightly different interpretation of the meaning also exists: "It is that look across the table when two people are sharing an unspoken but private moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. An expressive and meaningful silence."^[2] It is also cited in books and articles on game theory associated with the volunteer's dilemma.

The word consists of the reflexive/passive prefix ma- (mam- before a vowel), the root ihlapi (pronounced [iɬapi]), which means to be at a loss as what to do next, the stative suffix -n, an achievement suffix -ata, and the dual suffix -apai, which in composition with the reflexive mam- has a reciprocal sense.

Yagán (originally Yahgan, but also now spelled Yaghan, Jagan, Iakan), also known as Yámana and Háusi Kúta, is one of the indigenous languages of Tierra del Fuego, spoken by the Yagán people. It is regarded as a language isolate, although some linguists have attempted to relate it to Kawésqar and Chon.

Along with other Fuegian languages, it was among the first South American languages to be recorded by European explorers and missionaries^{[citation needed]}. Yahgan was also spoken briefly on Keppel Island in the Falkland Islands at a missionary settlement.

Tierra del Fuego (pron.: /tiːˈɛərə dɛl ˈfweɪɡoʊ/, Spanish: [ˈtjera ðel ˈfweɣo]; Spanish for "Fireland" or "Land of Fire") is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of a main island Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego divided between Chile and Argentina with an area of 48,100 km² (18,572 sq mi), and a group of many islands including Cape Horn and Diego Ramírez Islands. While initially discovered by Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1520, it was not settled by people of European descent until the second half of the 19th century at the height of the sheep farming and gold rush booms. Today, petroleum extraction dominates economic activity in the north of Tierra del Fuego, while tourism, manufacturing and Antarctic logistics are important in the south.

(Via: Wikipedia)

Trees Call For Help

A tree stands alone in the drought-stricken Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho, in an undated picture.

Scientists Identify The Sounds Made By Drought-Stressed Trees.

Gape Popkin reports in National Geographic 

In the lab, a team of French scientists has captured the ultrasonic noise made by bubbles forming inside water-stressed trees. Because trees also make noises that aren't related to drought impacts, scientists hadn't before been able to discern which sounds are most worrisome. (Watch a video: Drought 101.)

"With this experiment we start to understand the origin of acoustic events in trees," said Alexandre Ponomarenko, a physicist at Grenoble University in France, whose team conducted the research.

This discovery could help scientists figure out when trees are parched and need emergency watering, added Ponomarenko, who presented his team's resultslast month at an American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

To figure out how to listen to trees, the French scientists drew on their knowledge of how trees take in water—essentially by drinking from a really long "straw."

Inside tree trunks are bundles of specialized tubes called xylem, which rely on the attractive forces between water molecules as well as those between water and plant cells to lift liquid to the highest leaves and branches. (See National Geographic's tree pictures.)

Because trees are so tall, the liquid in the xylem can be under intense pressure—many times that of the atmosphere around us—but the attractive forces between neighboring water molecules keep the water column intact.

In drought-stricken trees, this increased pressure can cause the water column to break, allowing dissolved air to form bubbles that block water flow.

These events are called cavitations, and while trees can withstand some, too many can be deadly.

Since cavitations can kill trees, scientists and forest managers want to know when they are increasing. (Also see "Pictures: Saving and Studying Tasmania's Giant Trees.")

Scientists have known for decades that microphones can pick up the noises that cavitations make. But because they couldn't see inside the tree, they weren't certain of the origins of these sounds, which could have resulted from wood creaking or breaking or xylem cells collapsing.

To answer the question, the team put a thin slice of pine wood into a liquid-filled gel capsule to mimic conditions inside a living tree.

The scientists then evaporated water from the gel, simulating a drought. As the wood began cavitating, the scientists filmed bubbles forming while recording with a microphone.

The scientists found that around half the sounds they picked up were associated with cavitations. The rest were from other processes, such as bubbles invading neighboring cells. Most important, the sound waves from each type of event made a distinct pattern. All of them are above the range of human hearing.

The researchers think they can compare sounds from living trees with these patterns, and determine which processes are creating the sounds.

According to Ponomarenko, the findings could lead to the design of a handheld device that allows people to diagnose stressed trees using only microphones.

Such a device may be particularly important if droughts become more common and more severe, as many global warming models predict they will. (Read "The New Dust Bowl" in National Geographic magazine.)

In fact, a study published in Nature last fall suggested that trees in many places—from tropical rain forests in South America to arid woodlands in the U.S. West—already "live on the edge," meaning their cavitation rate is almost as high as they can sustain.

Ponomarenko's method could provide an early warning that cavitations are increasing.

For instance, he envisions a device that would attach to a tree and constantly listen for sounds of thirst. If needed, the device could then trigger an emergency-watering system.

Ponomarenko's research is promising, added Cornell University's Abe Stroock, whose lab designed the gel capsule the French team used. He said the result "opens a new mode of observation" into cavitation. (See pictures of the 2012 drought that parched much of the United States.)

But he also noted that the wood samples used in the team's study had to be "excised and abused," so they don't necessarily behave exactly like wood in a living tree.

"Translating [these findings] to a living plant and into different species is a lot of work, potentially," he said.

Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others

When you hear a language that you don’t speak, it usually sounds like it’s speeding by at an incomprehensible rate. Researchers from the Université de Lyon decided to find out once and for all why certain languages sound so much faster than others. For the study, 59 native speakers of English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese, were instructed to read the following passage out loud in each of their native languages:

• “Last night I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful night that I wandered down to the garden to get a breath of fresh air. Then I heard a click as the door closed behind me.”

Two values were calculated for each language: the information density of the average syllable, and the average number of syllables spoken per second.  The density was determined by analyzing how much meaning the average syllable contained. For example, a single-syllable word like “love,” has more meaning packed into it than another single-syllable word, like “to.” 

             

The results found that the more data-dense a language’s average syllable was, the fewer those syllables had to be spoken per second, leading to slower speech.  Mandarin, which topped the density list at 0.94, was the slowest language in the group, spoken at 5.18 syllables per second. In Mandarin, the way you say a syllable can change the meaning – therefore, it makes sense that a language that is more concerned with pitch over speed to have a lower syllable-per-second ratio. The fastest language in the group was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, because of its lower 0.49 density. A language’s speed hinges on the correlation between its information density and the rate of speech. Interestingly enough, while languages do indeed have different “speed limits,” most are able to convey the same amount of information in exactly the same amount of time. 

Source: TIME

Politicians and Their Twisted Words

By George Carlin

Brits Create Robot That Learns Simple Words By Conversing With Humans

Post by "CavalierZee"

In an attempt to replicate the early experiences of infants, researchers in England have created a robot that can learn simple words in minutes just by having a conversation with a human.

The work, published this week in the journal PLoS One, offers insight into how babies transition from babbling to speaking their first words.

The three-foot-tall robot, named DeeChee, was built to produce any syllable in the English language. But it knew no words at the outset of the study, speaking only babble phrases like "een rain rain mahdl kross."

During the experiment, a human volunteer attempted to teach the robot simple words for shapes and colors by using them repeatedly in regular speech.

At first, all DeeChee could comprehend was an unsegmented stream of sounds. But DeeChee had been programmed to break up that stream into individual syllables and to store them in its memory. Once there, the words were ranked according to how often they came up in conversation; words like "red" and "green" were prized.

DeeChee also was designed to recognize words of encouragement, like "good" and "well done," from its human conversation partner. That feedback helped transform the robot's babble into coherent words, sometimes in as little as two minutes.

If repetition of sounds helps infants learn a language, then it's not surprising that our first words are often mainstays like "mama" and "dada." But why don't we start using common and simple words like "and" or "the" at the same time?

The answer, said study leader Catherine Lyon, a computer scientist at the University of Hertfordshire, is that the words that form the connective tissue of our language - words like "at," "with" and "of" - are spoken in hundreds of different ways, making them difficult for newbies to recognize. On the other hand, more concrete words like "house" or "blue" tend to be spoken in the same way nearly every time.

Because the study relied on the human volunteers speaking naturally, Lyon said it was crucial that the robot resemble a person. DeeChee was programmed to smile when it was ready to pay attention to its teacher and to stop smiling and blink when it needed a break. (Though DeeChee was designed to have a gender-neutral appearance, humans tended to treat it as a boy, according to the study.)

"When we asked people to talk to the robot as a small child, it seemed to come quite naturally to them," she said. "When they talk to a bit of disembodied software, you don't get the same response."

Paul Goldstein, a psychologist at Cornell University who has also used robots to study infant learning but wasn't involved in this study, said the work was highly innovative - and that if the researchers' theory about language acquisition is correct, they can use robots to prove it.

"If we really think we understand how infants learn," he said, "then we should be able to build a robot that can do it."

Via: "Phys"