Word puzzles

Abstract

A new review looks at the remarkable human ability to learn vocabulary in one or more languages. Nigel Williams reports. A new review looks at the remarkable human ability to learn vocabulary in one or more languages. Nigel Williams reports. One of the most remarkable human abilities is that of learning a language. Not only do people learn to speak, but more recently they have learned to read — to associate the spoken sounds with written symbols. It is an extraordinary biological achievement, particularly as written language is relatively new. In a new review published (online) within a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, M. Gareth Gaskell and Andrew Ellis, at the University of York, introduce a series of papers on this most intriguing of topics. While the field has its own researchers, the issues have a wider resonance. The whole concept of information is a biological one and how it is conveyed from molecule to molecule, cell to cell and individual to individual is of increasing interest. The concept of signalling has fascinated biologists. “The symbolic character of a signalling system is crucial, whether in the genetic code, in the control of development, or in human language. Only a symbolic system can convey an indefinitely large number of messages,” wrote John Maynard Smith, a geneticist and theoretical biologist with a great interest in information systems. “Word learning is a fundamental building block in the acquisition of language, and has often been identified as one of the ‘special’ components of language,” write Gaskell and Ellis. “ Humans are phenomenally good at learning words, far exceeding the capabilities of other primates in this respect. By early adulthood, first language speakers will know at least 20,000 base words plus their morphologically complex forms, and some estimates suggest a far higher figure. Furthermore, word learning often appears swift and effortless.” The review covers a wide range of research looking at language learning. “It is generally accepted that the first 12 months of life involve a process of refining and tuning of the phonetic categories that are relevant to the infant's language. Contrasts that are unused in a particular language will tend to be lost, so that by 10–12 months of age only the phonetic categories that are relevant to a particular language remain.” So the tonal distinctions of Chinese syllables, for example, learnt so easily by young native speakers become increasingly difficult to recognise and reproduce for older, foreign learners. But researchers are increasingly finding how able young children are at acquiring more than one language at once. “The important precursor to word learning has led to the assumption that vocabulary acquisition starts in earnest only in the second year,” Gaskell and Ellis write. “One might expect that the increased demands of learning multiple languages at the same time would lead to substantial delays in reaching key stages in infant word learning,” they say. But increasingly the evidence proves opposite. “Perhaps surprisingly, the data available so far suggest that any differences between bilingual and monolingual infants are quite subtle, and that any delays for bilinguals are relatively short lived.” They report on work examining the ability of young children to associate minimally different spoken sequences (for example, bih and dih) with visually presented objects. This kind of mapping can be performed by monolingual infants by 17 months, in spite of the difficulty of the minimal distinction. Bilingual infants failed this task at 17 months, but 20-month-olds were able to learn the mappings, they report. “Children start to learn to read some years after they begin to talk. Where we might reasonably propose genetic support for spoken language acquisition, the fact that writing is a recent invention, and that only a tiny minority of the people who have lived and died on this planet have ever learned to read, means that the acquisition of literacy, including the acquisition of new written words, must be supported by other, more general, cognitive and neural systems,” they say. “Cognitive processes that assemble the meanings of phrases, sentences and texts operate on both spoken and written language. What is unique about learning to read is the remarkable way that readers learn to recognize letters across different shapes and forms and to recognize words that are differentiated only by the number and sequence of their component letters.”