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The Accent Conjecture | ||
Tags: Language Acquisition Theory | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 33 of 37 17 January 2015 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Potentially store, yes - though that is episodic, meaning a subset of declarative memory, not prodecural - but access? I remember reading that the majority of those few people with hyperthymesia end up unable to live their lives as they want to because of the increased cognitive load that comes from remembering involuntarily and having to sift through all the information to find the one they wanted to access, and that many of them struggle with remembering factual information that is not tied to their autobiographic memory.
Also: Would you use Usain Bolt as your model for how fast humans should be able to run? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 34 of 37 17 January 2015 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
This is indeed a phenomenon that developmental scientists study, and it's called perceptual narrowing. It's not unique to language. In general, when the brain has to process a noisy/complex signal into categories (such as extracting phonemes from speech, or identifying individuals from different views of their faces) it computes a solution that emphasizes differences that distinguish among the categories, while learning to ignore differences that fall within a category. It's not that there isn't enough room in the brain--if presented with a 150-category or 300-category system, the brain will learn to take into account features of the signal that are important for distinguishing any of the categories. But if presented with a smaller system it will reliably learn to ignore uninformative parts of the signal. Young babies can distinguish different monkeys' faces much better than adults can. They lose this ability before they turn 1, but you can get them to retain it by playing games where they see a bunch of monkey pictures and hear "names" for each individual one! However, babies' better ability to distinguish monkey faces and nonnative phonemes does come at a cost; they aren't as good as adults at distinguishing human faces and native language phonemes. That's why the brain has to learn to throw away all that information to refine its performance. Up to this point, developmental scientists more or less agree. The tricky part comes in when we observe that children's ability to retrain their perceptual (and production) systems gradually decreases over time. While adults can adjust them, they much more often fail to do so. Scientists still argue about whether this happens because brain maturation causes the brain to lose this flexibility, or because the person's history of learning puts the system in a configuration that is hard to perturb with further learning. Regarding the adaptive significance of loss of plasticity, there's a vague general idea that losing plasticity is beneficial because it prevents the brain from losing its valuable acquired knowledge--usually, the structures acquired during childhood are close enough so that small adjustments during adulthood are enough. And the organism is assumed to benefit from the system being relatively stable. More specific ideas like the accent conjecture tend not to be well received by the scientific community because they're hard to demonstrate, and it's usually possible to tell similar stories about all kinds of real or counterfactual human traits. That of course doesn't mean they aren't true. I think it's implausible that accents originated as an adaptation for group marking, but given that proto-accents would have already existed in some form in the early stages of language (after all, even songbirds learn regional variations in their songs and can't overwrite them easily) it's possible that selection related to group marking influenced the form accents take today in modern humans. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 35 of 37 18 January 2015 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for a very informative post, robarb! I feel like I've learned a lot from this thread. It's true that evolution has in many other instances "hijacked" traits evolved for different reasons to make them social markers. Crying is originally a mechnaism for getting dirt out of your eyes, but has also evolved into a social marker for signlling that one is sad. Anyway, that developmental explanation of how categories develop is very interesting and explains a lot about accents. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 36 of 37 18 January 2015 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree that that developmental explanation sounds very good and logical, and it confirms
my observations though anecdotal. But when I meant cost to the species, I mean that evolving even more sensorily refined brains and apparatuses would be counterproductive to humans. That would require too much energy and brain-rewiring. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chobbs Newbie United States Joined 4580 days ago 35 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 37 of 37 20 January 2015 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I think this is a key point and one that many people who bring up how well children can speak often neglect in their focus on specific phonemes. The fact is even children with phonemic issues still speak their native tongue fluently and understandably because their prosody is correct. The good news is that is is dead simple to train too. Here is a link to a document covering it better than I could in a post: Choral Practice The above document gives an overview and some arguments for the choral practice approach. The following published paper goes into a lot more details: Accent Addition It is a pretty easy process to create sets of practice files for this process with Audacity from sample sentences. From there it is just a matter of repeating in unison with the recordings until the native prosody is a natural part of your flow for that target language. It has really fixed up my French pronunciation, and my son's German as well. I am sure results are even better if one has access to a native speaker to lead the choral practice, but even just self-learning with audio files has been very effective for us. I hope the information on how to train this aspect of speech helps some folks. I was really surprised at how easy it was and how quickly I saw results. Now if only there was a similar hack for French listening comprehension. :) BTW, Olle has a Facebook group for this as well that links a document tutoring how to make and use the practice files in case somebody wants to try this and desires a step-by-step guide. Also, I did a quick search on the forum and his work has been brought up before, so there might be plenty of details buried on here too. - Chris 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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