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From: osborn@ultima.cs.uts.oz (Tomasso Osborn)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Early Language Learning & Ancient Language
Message-ID: <17833@ultima.cs.uts.oz>
Date: 25 May 90 06:29:03 GMT
References: <17809@ultima.cs.uts.oz> <2246@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> <6544@ucrmath.UCR.EDU>
Organization: University of Technology, Sydney
Lines: 41

baez@ucr.edu (john baez) writes:

>In article <2246@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> frank@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU (francis John breen) writes:
>>From article <17809@ultima.cs.uts.oz>, by dcorbett@ultima.cs.uts.oz (Dan Corbett):

>>> ...  Three different consonants in Navajo may get mapped to only one
>>> consonant in my brain, making it impossible for me to _ever_ tell the
>>> difference among them.  The structure of my brain was determined by my
>>> English-speaking parents, and cannot now be altered by memorizing foreign
>>> words.

>This seems very unlikely unless you're somehow specially
>disabled.  Don't blame your brain!  :-)  It's very flexible
>if one works hard.  I used to lisp, but was trained out of
>it by a speech therapist.  I can now play things on the piano
>that would have been impossible at one time.  I would only
>think the mental task you describe is impossible for you
>if you said that you'd spend several months of daily practice
>on it without making any headway.

What Frank Breen is talking about is learning to do things (changing
from lisp, or playing piano) - produce actions, effective stuff. Dan 
is talking about way up the front-end of perception (mapping speech 
sounds to consonants). [Think how you would engineering this - 
pre-filters are not available, so do you re-wire, or try to post-
process?]

The former (effective) learning is easily accomodated by neural plasticity 
but how far this can go towards the front-end is something I haven't
seen discussed (definitively). Seems like the front-end gets pretty well
hard-wired. Of course, after you have (adequate) categories wired-in
the cortex(es) have a lot of scope for adaptation (even learning new
languages if they fit old phonetics OK). But what if the front-end
can't cope?

Tomasso.
-- 
Tom Osborn,                        "HEY! There is something more important
School of Computing Sciences,       than money... 
University of Technology, Sydney,                ...it's called breathing."
PO Box 123 Broadway 2007,  AUSTRALIA.