*Easy/Moderate *Not messy *30 minutes or less
Imagine parachuting into a foreign land where people speak a language completely unfamiliar to you without anyone to translate for you or teach you the new language. How would you learn where to buy food or ask where the bathroom is? People don’t typically pause in between words when they’re speaking, so one of the first things you have to do is sort through a continuous stream of sound in order to find words like “bathroom” and “food”. But how can you do this?
All language learners face this challenge to some extent, but this is particularly true for babies who can’t benefit from translation or foreign language lessons. Luckily, humans are really good at picking up on patterns and associations in the environment. This ability to pick up on patterns and associations is called statistical learning and it is super important for learning language. Amazingly, without even knowing it, you can learn that some sounds are really likely to be spoken together, and this allows you to learn words. For example, over time a baby will learn that “prettybaby” can be divided into the words “pretty” and “baby” because the syllables “pre” and “ty” are more likely to be spoken together than “ty” and “ba”.
“prettybaby“
Let’s do an experiment to test your statistical learning skills:
First print out the test sheet and set it aside for now (we’ll need this for step 2). Don’t print out the answer sheet yet, or if you do, no peeking!
This is Gavagi, an alien from an unknown planet. For the first part of the experiment, listen to them speak and see if you can pick up on any patterns that might help you learn the words of their alien language. They’re very chatty so they go on and on for a couple of minutes without stopping, but make sure you listen to the whole thing. Click play when you’re ready to listen:
Now, grab the test sheet and something to write with. The audio clips below are sorted into pairs. One word in each pair is a word from Gavagi’s alien language and the other is a word from another alien language. Listen to both words in each pair and circle on your test sheet which word (Word #1 or Word #2) in each pair is the word from Gavagi’s language. Once you’ve given an answer for every pair, you can finally peek at the answer sheet.
Pair # 1
Word #1
Word #2
Pair #2
Word #1
Word #2
Pair #3
Word #1
Word #2
Pair #4
Word #1
Word #2
How many words did you get right?
Congratulations! You just used your statistical learning abilities to learn words in an alien language. Test your friends and family to see if they can also pick up on the patterns and learn alien words!
“Parachuting into Language” by Amy Lebkuecher
**Special thanks to Dr. Lizz Karuza for donating the audio clips**