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Lara Cowell

Can Animals Acquire Language? - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

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    In the last half century, much effort has been placed into teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. However, successes have been limited: animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. Here are some things that differentiate humans from animals: 1. The fact that animals don't ask "why?" shows they don't aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. 2. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities. 3. Another essential characteristic of human language is its normativity-namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. Animals lack this capacity.
Lara Cowell

The A.I. Chatbots Have Arrived. Time to Talk to Your Kids. - 1 views

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    Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. It's important to understand how a chatbot works, employing a "neural network": a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. The chatbot works by scraping the internet for digital text or images. It gathers information from a variety of places, including websites, social media platforms and databases, but it does not necessarily choose the most reliable sources. In other words, even though chatbots may appear authoritative, rigorous and trustworthy, they are not always reliable and can produce content that is offensive, racist, biased, outdated, incorrect or simply inappropriate.
Lara Cowell

Are musicians better language learners? | Education | The Guardian - 2 views

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    When children start studying music before the age of seven, they develop bigger vocabularies, a better sense of grammar and a higher verbal IQ. These advantages benefit both the development of their mother tongue and the learning of foreign languages. During these crucial years, the brain is at its sensitive development phase, with 95% of the brain's growth occurring now. Music training started during this period also boosts the brain's ability to process subtle differences between sounds and assist in the pronunciation of languages - and this gift lasts for life, as it has been found that adults who had musical training in childhood still retain this ability to learn foreign languages quicker and more efficiently than adults who did not have early childhood music training. Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers such as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, indicates that speech as a form of communication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music and language neural networks have significant overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning the grammar, vocabulary and pronounciation of any language.
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