What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the language that their guardians speak around their home, so there seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online" learning.

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Anon84 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Me too! Babies and toddlers brains are like sponges. We started teaching my baby 3 languages since birth (essentially I always spoken with her in my native language, my wife in hers and gets English from living in the US). She’s not even 4 yet an fully fluent in all three and seemlessly jumps back and forth between them. (To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence)

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phkahler 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>> To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence

I knew two brothers that would mix words from different languages while speaking to each other because they shared the same set of languages and presumably used the best words to express their thoughts.

Your daughter probably knows other people generally speak and understand one language at a time and just conforms because its most effective.

I'm not sure if or at what age it might be good to start mixing languages with others who can.

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fellowniusmonk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you look at the rate of "new" word use after the first spoken word its very clear that word acquisition and categorizing occurs for a long period before that first word is ever spoken.

Speaking to babies is incredibly important for linguistics but probably for all types of complex brain function, I don't think there is an upper bound on how many words we should expose children too.

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mcswell 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a lot more to language learning than being a "sponge". Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before. And the grammar is implicit in what we hear, so children need to extract it in a form that can be generalized to new thoughts and words.

	▲	coldtea 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before. That's downstream of the sponge phase. So much so, that initially we only absorb and don't talk yet.
	▲	mbg721 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is why learning Latin the way I did (very methodically and technically, with no real speaking/responding) makes you good at parsing it, but not at speaking it. There are schools today where it's taught as if it were a spoken language.

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griffzhowl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One part of the story I found fascinating is the overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax. These diverge and specialize in adults. The homologous brain region in primates is involved in motor planning.

It's an interesting hint at the deeper evolutionary origins of language in the ability to plan complex actions, providing a neural basis for the observation that language and action planning have this common structure of an overall goal that can be decomposed into a structure of subgoals, which we see formalized in computer programs too.

This is an older reference (1991) where I first heard about it. there are more recent studies reinforcing various aspects of it but I didn't find one that was as comprehensive

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00071235

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mcswell 3 days ago | parent [-]

"overlap in infants' brains of the areas involved in tool use and hierarchical syntax"---you didn't see that in the Quanta article, right? I went back and looked, but can't find it mentioned anywhere.

	▲	griffzhowl 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not from the quanta article. By "story" I just meant the general story of the neural basis for language. What I mentioned in the comment is from the article I linked there

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lapcat 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this quote may speak to the question:

> The brain’s general object-recognition machinery is at the same level of abstractness as the language network. It’s not so different from some higher-level visual areas such as the inferotemporal cortex (opens a new tab) storing bits of object shapes, or the fusiform face area storing a basic face template.

In other words, it sounds like the brain may start with the same basic methods of pattern matching for many different contexts, but then different areas of the brain specialize in looking for patterns in specific contexts such as vision or language.

This seems to align with the research of Jenny Saffran, for example, who has studied how babies recognize language, arguing that this is largely statistical pattern matching.

	▲	mullsork 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		In the series Babies by Netflix some of her research on this topic is covered. Season 1 Episode 4 "First Words."

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trebligdivad 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd like one stage further - what are the genetics of this area? How does a dedicated brain area like this get encoded - (Hopefully the Allen Institute might dig on this one?); but if we can find how the areas are encoded in the DNA we could presumably see how they evolved, but then perhaps also spot other areas?

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lukeinator42 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's an interesting area of research, there is even some evidence that language experienced in utero affects speech perception: https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.12098.

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fuzzfactor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At that age, I always figured "Why parse?"