http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/19
CTV and CBC have reported over the last couple of days on a piece of research involving babies watching videos of people speaking English and French. The study revealed that the children attended to the facial movements of speakers of the two languages in a manner similar to that in which they attended to the speech sounds of speakers of the two languages. Briefly, children in the process of acquiring language tend to attend more intently to sounds which differ from those they have already dealt with. This is considered an essential strategy in childhood language acquisition. The conclusion drawn by both news outlets is that small children can distinguish between English and French just by watching people's faces.
Although it makes perfect sense to me that children in what I'll call accelerated acquisition mode would be sensitive and attentive to differences in sound and sight, whether linguistic or otherwise, I do not think we are justified in assuming that the subjects of the experiment in question perceived facial movements as linguistic acts. As children learn to articulate the phonetic elements of languages, they most likely do pay attention to movements of lips and tongue. Mine, who happen to be bilingual Mandarin and English speakers, do, particularly when attacking their father tongue (English), to which they experience much less exposure. However, linguistically motivated attention to movements of lips and tongue is generally accompanied by attention to sound. In other words, it is quite possible, probably most likely, that the children in the experiment were responding to the facial movements in the videos as visual stimuli, not as speech acts and not as models of phonetic articulation.
I do not doubt that children combine attention to facial movement and attention to speech sounds as they acquire the phonetic inventory of languages they plan to acquire. Even adults do that. My objection is to the assumption that children interpret differences or sets of differences in facial movements as differences between languages.
I'd like to read the paper itself, but will have to wait, not doubt, some time for the electronic version to become available.
Other Sources
University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre: Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy
Posted by Mark Penny |
