Page 35 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

Speaking is partnered with listening and the process of learning to listen is as intriguing as it is complex, as the learner needs to be able to associate the sounds being produced with the person, animal or object making the sound. Initially when we are young, the learner then must decode and remember the sounds to extract some meaning, and then interpret that meaning via the context they are experiencing the sound in. Over time this is eventually done automatically, ‘on the fly’, as we hear word sounds. Sounds and their reflection provide us clues to the shape of the space we are in, as well as the proximity of those sound, while volume, pitch and timbre of sound provide clues as to what we should listen to, and what we can safely ignore. These subtleties of listening are all clues as to which words and sounds we should decode and remember.
It is suggested that vocal tract actions for the sounds of the language are stored in memory as motor programs and sequenced together into larger meaningful units during speaking. Speech articulator motion for the different vowel sounds was found to be influenced by the identity of the following consonant suggesting that speech movements are modified in chunks larger than the individual phonetic segments.44
Vincent Gracco & Anders Lofqvist
Resource 10: The Decay Curve for Learning a Language
Babies learn and process sounds made by people present within their visual/oral range by collecting statistics around the sounds that they hear and then process the most common sounds into memories.
It is obvious that this child is not learning to talk simply by memorizing sentences or sentence types. Rather, she is formulating her own rules to help her understand sentences she hears around her to produce sentences like them. Once she formulates a rule, she uses it confidently until she begins to notice differences between her sentences and the sentences adults use.46 Temple C; Nathan R; Temple F; & Burris N. A
44 Vincent 1. Gracco and Anders L6fqvist (1993). Speech Motor Coordination and Control: Evidence From Lip, Jaw, and Laryngeal Movements. Retrieved from http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/sr115/SR115_02.pdf
45 Kuhl, Patricia (TED) The Linguistic Genius of babies (2010) Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies#t-580954
46 Temple C; Nathan R; Temple F; & Burris N. A. How Children Learn to Talk. Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall. Retrieved from
https://www.education.com/reference/article/how-children-learn-talk/
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The speed at which babies learn to speak using such complex language patterns is extraordinary. This capacity has to do with the fact that when born, our brains are 80- 90% neurons and this percentage will reduce considerably by the time we reach our mid to late 20’s. Why do we have so many neurons when we are born and why do they then seem to fade away?
Put simply this model suggests that having lots of neurons at birth allows us to learn to sense our world and learn to talk, as each of these processes require our historical neural brain we had permanently millions of years ago. Once we have achieved this language acquisition our capability to learn a new language decays as neurons die off or morph into another cell type called astrocytes. This decay in the percentage of neurons in our brain results in a rapid decrease in our ability to learn language as seen in the graph provided by Patricia Kuhl in her TED talk.45