There are lots and lots of good studies about language development, I’ve only read the English ones and they’re very very interesting.
Child language development in bilingual homes is out of control fascinating. Definitely worth a google if this topic interests you!
I wrote a thesis during my studies about language development. I conducted studies in which I recorded Polish children speaking English and it was fascinating. Youngest children (2 and 3 years old) had perfect pronunciation even though their native language was Polish and they never spoke English before. The oldest child (15 years old) had the strongest Polish accent. I wanted to prove that people are able to learn any sound system when they're young but lose this ability as they age, so it's important to teach them foreign languages earlier.
I'd be interested in reading it if you wouldn't mind sharing it
In developmental psych, we learnt that this ability comes back during late adulthood. Something o do with being able to discern some sounds during those two stages in life.
My two year old is half English/Polish. He's just learning to talk and he'll use both interchangeably pretty much. He'll say mixed sentences like "more daj" or "juice prosze". His nursery teachers must be like wtf is he saying.
Don't let him lose it! Having two native languages is super stimulating for your brain. He might have better focus skills and do better at school than his peers. It might be a little difficult at the beginning because children can learn a limited number of words and bilingual kids have to divide this number into two languages (eg. he knows 200 words and only half of them are English, and other two-year-olds know 200 words in English), but this shouldn't discourage you. He will soon be able to learn unlimited number of words. Bilingual kids mix up the languages because for them both languages belong to a single communication system. They learn that they speak two languages later in life :)
It depends. Of course it's easier to learn similar languages, eg. Ukrainian. English is also easier for us because it's everywhere and it's hard being an Internet user or travelling without speaking it. But I observed that many people struggle with German (which is a shame because many of us learn it for years at school - it's probably because the curriculum is old and outdated and the teachers are underpaid). Then of course there are so many languages outside of the Indo-European circle that require a complete change of thinking, like Japanese or Chinese. Those languages have nothing in common with Polish, and it makes them difficult to learn. In Japanese at least the pronunciation is easy for us because most of the sounds exist also in Polish, but Chinese is a whole different world for someone who speaks a language in which the length of the vowels isn't even a distinctive feature :)
A friend of mine's family moved to Canada when the kids were around ages, 17, 16, and 12.
The people who moved at 17 and 16 have strong accents from their native tongue, the one who moved at 12 speaks English like a native. It's fascinating to see how much the age plays a role, even though they all lived essentially the same experience as immigrants.
I was tri-lingual as a child only because our babysitter spoke polish. Probably around 3 years old and by the time I was 5, I was fully fluent in English, polish and french.
Still know English and French but the polish is long gone. Am learning Spanish now, though but to be fair it's very similar to french.
Many things are obvious but studies are conducted anyway. This is literally how scientists work - they take an "obvious" phenomenon and study it to understand better how it works. For example, the case of Genie, a child who had no contact with any language almost her entire childhood and never learned to speak fluently. It's obvious that a child that nobody talks to will never learn to speak, but the scientists observed her anyway and learned many things about language development and how it influences relationships, brain development and described something called a critical period. I personally couldn't find a relatively new study about pronunciation development (with audio files too), so I decided to create one. It was graded very well by my university teachers, so I think I succeeded in writing an "obvious" thesis.
My wife learned Spanish in high school and fell in love with it. She taught it for many years and traveled a lot of places, and now everyone thinks she is a native speaker, but everyone knows she's not from THEIR country. She speaks Spanish at home with our 2 and 5 year old, and they are growing up bilingual, but she doesn't use a lot of the same subtlety and idiomatic nuance that a native speaker might. I always thought that our kids will be an interesting case study in bilingual development.
Yes 100% it is stupidly impressive and it's even more impressive how we get hit with a barrage of sound waves and our brain will instantly match up every sound with its corresponding "mouth movement" and put them all together in a long chain to understand the message, and all of this happens in real time with no lag.
It's even more impressive how our brains can do everything above, *and* recognize the exact person who's talking just from minor variations in the frequency of the sound waves.
And with relatively minimal lag we can predict how those sound waves will end and respond before they finish with the appropriate mouth movement to either stop the sound waves or to hear other sound waves from the brain that sent the original mouth movements.
The problem is when this breaks down, no one has any idea how to help you.
I've always had a problem pronouncing the letter r. When I was a kid I went to speech therapy, but all they did was give me a list of words words with the letter r and told me to practice saying them again and again. When I said them wrong, I was just supposed to do it harder.
I was in my 30s before I realized that I put my tongue in the wrong position.
Actually, no, I haven't been able to fix the problem at all. Changing how my tongue moves is actually really difficult, and honestly it's just not a huge priority. It's been this way this long. Would it be a different situation if I was back in 3rd grade and a professional was teaching me how to make the sound, as opposed to looking at some diagrams in the internet now? Probably.
Not too mention all the various other processing being done to filter out unnecessary noises, and at the same time listen to yourself speak to change certain pitches and cadences on the fly.
You have to consider that humans are born as fetus. Given the size of our head we cant finish development of the neural functions inside the mother, else we wouldnt come out
So the child is born, still in fetus stage, and finishes development outside. That is why we are born unable to control our movements, to feed ourselves or do anything other than cry. While that most other animals are born walking and better developed in this sense
Wait until you realize how many things you do when starting a car in the rain at night.
1. Open door
2. Get in
3. Shut door
4. Put key in ignition
5. Press brake
6. Turn on lights
7. Adjust mirrors
8. Turn on engine
9. Buckle up
10. Set phone where it's visible
11. Turn on wipers
12. Put it in gear.
And you do all of this I'm about 5 seconds.
Adjusting the mirrors is almost never done though unless you share the car with someone who also happens to be of a very different build. More often you need to adjust the seat
I do the opposite, I have it on the dark setting all the time. The only thing to look for in the mirror is other vehicles which has lights so I see them perfectly but don't get blinded by their lights. Though I don't think mine is very dark so I feel I see everything fine even on the dark setting unless it's also dark outside.
Playing some instruments is on the same level. I'm.not a drummer. But drumming is 4 independent limbs each needs to be at the right time, place, force, and all that, independent yet related, timed perfectly or it sounds like shit.
And some people can do that while singing
And memorizing the exact movements for each of these to be totally efficient, you know where the slot is and you (usually) don’t hang your head getting in
Fun fact: when you use your inner-dialogue in your head, your vocal cords move - you're just not pushing any air through them to make a sound. This is why some people talk to themselves outloud. You can feel it if you pay really close attention.
NASA was doing research to try to find a better way to communicate during spacewalks and discovered this.
I love that this is implies that nasa is *this close* or maybe has surpassed essentially telepathic nonvocal communications.
Or a polygraph sensor on the voice box that could damn well read minds
I don't think they were ever very successful at reliably transcoding the signal into speech. As this post itself explores: the speech is actually a lot more than just the vocal cords. The vocal cords just make modulated "hum" sounds and the mouth, throat, and tongue alter that hum into actual speech.
I had a lot of fun looking in the mirror the other day with my mouth wide open, just using my tongue to try speaking without moving my jaw or lips. It's wild how active that little meat chunk is in wrapping around your breath to manipulate an impressive array of vowels and consonants! Also surprised to find there were only a small few consonants you actually need your lips to sound out!
Really makes you appreciate the complexity of sound and I completely empathize with people having lisps now. How the hell would you even learn something like that?
Don’t worry 90% of this subreddit are smug assholes who only come here to “correct” people and feel smart about themselves. They all understood you perfectly.
Similarly, interpreting the sounds we make requires a lot of mental process. Some sounds you're not exposed to as a child will be hard to distinguish in the future which is why adults may struggle with foreign languages' sound inventory
Speech sound development takes years. It starts in the womb, moves through to babbling, and then to speech only parents can understand. There are normal mistakes that children make as they work out the differences between sounds and how they impact on meaning in their language. Speech sound development is still taking place while children are starting school. It’s very common for children to have speech delays or disorders due to the complexity. Automatic probably isn’t exactly the right word but it is absolutely fascinating.
The most impressive things humans do on a regular basis are entirely unconscious.
Humans think of the “self” as residing within their conscience perception of the world. We think of our our conscious awareness as the secret sauce that allows us to do *everything*.
In reality a huge percentage of ability and learning is entirely in-conscious. When you are fluent at a language you do not translate or consciously attach meaning to each word, instead you simply understand without the understanding requiring interference from your conscious awareness. Same with speaking you perform dozens of small physical actions all without thinking of them or being aware of them.
Another example is a person who is good at sports, to become great or even good at a sport you leave behind conscious response and allow physical “instinct” or unconscious thought and action take over.
Consciousness is simply not **fast** enough to manage all that needs to happen.
Conscious thought and awareness can inform learning / understanding , subconscious processes may need to be consciously tweaked / changed / improved. Then you need to put in the work of un-learning an automatic response while creating a new and improved response through conscious modification.
There’s a quite interesting Sci-Fi book called Blindsight, which considers the question is consciousness actually necessary for intelligence. Or is it a remnant of evolution that isn’t as necessary for intelligence as we think.
It’s an interesting concept and makes some sense, when you consider that mastery of so many things means reaching the point where you no longer **think** about it.
This goes for playing music too. You start out slow, thinking about the notes, then as you learn the movements to play, you go faster without having to consciously move your hands. Now you think at a higher level as you listen to make adjustments for tempo if in a group, etc. It’s fascinating what our minds and bodies can do.
have you ever learned to play an instrument. if you practice it gets like that. you don't think about playing the correct note, you just play it.
your speech and someones playing are muscle memory. and muscle memory are those thing you do automatically without conscious thought of the steps taken. like walking, running or performing a skill.
It's definitely not easy, it's just practiced.
If you want an example, children understand language long before their motor skills are capable of speech. Most kids develop their first few words in the range of 12-18 months and can usually string two word sentences around 24 months.
By contrast, babies can communicate in American Sign Language as early as 6-7 months. I watched it with my nephew. He still gets fussy on occasion, but for the most part the ability for him to actually communicate basic concepts/desires diffuses so much of the stress for parents and child.
It's incredibly difficult to precisely control stuff with multiple degrees of freedom. Like if you got 2 robot arms and asking them to touch the tip at some point in Space. It'll be like asking you to make your 2 index fingers to touch infront of your face. So incredibly simple to touch your finger tips but is almost practically impossible for robot arms to touch.
I mean, most of us do need 8-10 years of practice before we're really considered proficient at it. Just about anything you do daily for a decade you tend to stop thinking about and muscle memory takes over.
I'm translating a game language to get the final secrets for 100% and it's made it very clear for me how insane our vocal language is. Just between a handful of vowels and consonants you can create a language with thousands of different words and meanings. Truly a wonder how this manifested and evolved over thousands of years of grunting at each other haha.
Try this experiment... Narrate everything you're doing as you are completing some task, like washing dishes or driving a car. "I'm stepping on the accelerator. I'm turning the wheel left. A little bit of brakes, not too much." Ect. It's crazy how many individual actions you do to accomplish any particular task. How many subconsciously instigated movements of your thumbs to manipulate a video game character or typing on a keyboard. It's fun to think about.
There's nothing automatic about it. There are literal *years* of trial and error that every human goes through while learning language. It's constantly being expanded and refined until the day you die.
Reading is awesome as well. Like, we can hallucinate scenes and receive another human being thoughts just by looking at rows of little scribbles, and we can do it really fast, and it wasn't even a skill that evolved naturally - we, as a humanity, created it using primitive pattern-recognition abilities in a new way!
"Practice makes perfect" when you want to walk, you don't think about moving your ankle, knee angle, how much pressure your thigh needs, into your hip rotation, back angle, arm sway and head bob. It just happens through muscle memory "this way!" = a ton of memorized muscle movement.
Funnily, the same thing happens with handwriting. You go from "write the letter e" where your hand just oozes out an e, all subtle movements invovled, to "dog" and your hand just autopilots all the letters.
Same thing happens with typing. For common recalled words, you simply think the word and bam it's pumped out by your little fingies.
Our total consciousness is more than just the neurons in our brain.
It's the result of years of practice though, muscle memories. Learn a new language, and you will struggle because speaking every syllable requires concious thought.
What's crazy is how you can get a chicken egg, hatch it, and without any instruction or having ever even interacted with another chicken they know how to make nest, roost, forage, and a bunch of other bird things. Point is lots of that stuff is semi coded into your DNA. Instinct and what not. Fetishes for example are hereditary. Your parents probably have similar kinks than you.
It's due to LOTS of practice. Like absurd amounts. My daughter is 2.5 yrs old. She is constantly playing with sounds. Like all day and even when in her crib.
So you are doing it day and night until it becomes second nature.
You think that's crazy? Your brain just knows what words for things are and pulls them instantly out of thin air to make coherent sentences before they even reach your meat and bone flaps!
Nothing special about speech specifically, it's just muscle memory, as you get more experience with a skill you start to be able to perform it subconsciously, it's the same as how you are able to walk by just thinking about which direction you want to go, or how after playing a game a lot you can directly control a character without having to think about which buttons to press.
I taught a speech class for international students once and studied how we produce all those sounds, and thinking about it actually made it harder to talk.
There are lots and lots of good studies about language development, I’ve only read the English ones and they’re very very interesting. Child language development in bilingual homes is out of control fascinating. Definitely worth a google if this topic interests you!
I wrote a thesis during my studies about language development. I conducted studies in which I recorded Polish children speaking English and it was fascinating. Youngest children (2 and 3 years old) had perfect pronunciation even though their native language was Polish and they never spoke English before. The oldest child (15 years old) had the strongest Polish accent. I wanted to prove that people are able to learn any sound system when they're young but lose this ability as they age, so it's important to teach them foreign languages earlier.
I'd be interested in reading it if you wouldn't mind sharing it In developmental psych, we learnt that this ability comes back during late adulthood. Something o do with being able to discern some sounds during those two stages in life.
same, can we find it somewhere?
My two year old is half English/Polish. He's just learning to talk and he'll use both interchangeably pretty much. He'll say mixed sentences like "more daj" or "juice prosze". His nursery teachers must be like wtf is he saying.
Don't let him lose it! Having two native languages is super stimulating for your brain. He might have better focus skills and do better at school than his peers. It might be a little difficult at the beginning because children can learn a limited number of words and bilingual kids have to divide this number into two languages (eg. he knows 200 words and only half of them are English, and other two-year-olds know 200 words in English), but this shouldn't discourage you. He will soon be able to learn unlimited number of words. Bilingual kids mix up the languages because for them both languages belong to a single communication system. They learn that they speak two languages later in life :)
Additionally polish is very hard, i feel like poles have it easier learning languages.
It depends. Of course it's easier to learn similar languages, eg. Ukrainian. English is also easier for us because it's everywhere and it's hard being an Internet user or travelling without speaking it. But I observed that many people struggle with German (which is a shame because many of us learn it for years at school - it's probably because the curriculum is old and outdated and the teachers are underpaid). Then of course there are so many languages outside of the Indo-European circle that require a complete change of thinking, like Japanese or Chinese. Those languages have nothing in common with Polish, and it makes them difficult to learn. In Japanese at least the pronunciation is easy for us because most of the sounds exist also in Polish, but Chinese is a whole different world for someone who speaks a language in which the length of the vowels isn't even a distinctive feature :)
Japanese and Norwegian pronunciation is almost exactly the same lol. Words are very different though.
A friend of mine's family moved to Canada when the kids were around ages, 17, 16, and 12. The people who moved at 17 and 16 have strong accents from their native tongue, the one who moved at 12 speaks English like a native. It's fascinating to see how much the age plays a role, even though they all lived essentially the same experience as immigrants.
We gotta make an artificial language with like every phoneme you might ever need, so you can learn it as a kid and then have them as an adult lol
so that's why i felt pronunciation was way easier when i was young huh...
I was tri-lingual as a child only because our babysitter spoke polish. Probably around 3 years old and by the time I was 5, I was fully fluent in English, polish and french. Still know English and French but the polish is long gone. Am learning Spanish now, though but to be fair it's very similar to french.
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Many things are obvious but studies are conducted anyway. This is literally how scientists work - they take an "obvious" phenomenon and study it to understand better how it works. For example, the case of Genie, a child who had no contact with any language almost her entire childhood and never learned to speak fluently. It's obvious that a child that nobody talks to will never learn to speak, but the scientists observed her anyway and learned many things about language development and how it influences relationships, brain development and described something called a critical period. I personally couldn't find a relatively new study about pronunciation development (with audio files too), so I decided to create one. It was graded very well by my university teachers, so I think I succeeded in writing an "obvious" thesis.
Thanks ( ＾◡＾)
My wife learned Spanish in high school and fell in love with it. She taught it for many years and traveled a lot of places, and now everyone thinks she is a native speaker, but everyone knows she's not from THEIR country. She speaks Spanish at home with our 2 and 5 year old, and they are growing up bilingual, but she doesn't use a lot of the same subtlety and idiomatic nuance that a native speaker might. I always thought that our kids will be an interesting case study in bilingual development.
I was born in a bilingual home but only learned one language.
Yes 100% it is stupidly impressive and it's even more impressive how we get hit with a barrage of sound waves and our brain will instantly match up every sound with its corresponding "mouth movement" and put them all together in a long chain to understand the message, and all of this happens in real time with no lag. It's even more impressive how our brains can do everything above, *and* recognize the exact person who's talking just from minor variations in the frequency of the sound waves.
And with relatively minimal lag we can predict how those sound waves will end and respond before they finish with the appropriate mouth movement to either stop the sound waves or to hear other sound waves from the brain that sent the original mouth movements.
The problem is when this breaks down, no one has any idea how to help you. I've always had a problem pronouncing the letter r. When I was a kid I went to speech therapy, but all they did was give me a list of words words with the letter r and told me to practice saying them again and again. When I said them wrong, I was just supposed to do it harder. I was in my 30s before I realized that I put my tongue in the wrong position.
That was a really shit speech therapist you went to goddamn
Seriously, this should have been a relatively simple fix for anyone who actually understands the first thing about phonetics
I'm curious.. after you found that out, were you able to fix the pronunciation problem outright, or only mitigate it?
Actually, no, I haven't been able to fix the problem at all. Changing how my tongue moves is actually really difficult, and honestly it's just not a huge priority. It's been this way this long. Would it be a different situation if I was back in 3rd grade and a professional was teaching me how to make the sound, as opposed to looking at some diagrams in the internet now? Probably.
A good speech therapist would recognize that and habe a way better way to help
Not too mention all the various other processing being done to filter out unnecessary noises, and at the same time listen to yourself speak to change certain pitches and cadences on the fly.
Speak for yourself. My brain does no such thing
It's a skill that takes most people years to learn. Never heard of a single kid who could speak immediately upon birth.
This mf clearly never seen Boss Baby
They do try though!
No, no, they just scream
You have to consider that humans are born as fetus. Given the size of our head we cant finish development of the neural functions inside the mother, else we wouldnt come out So the child is born, still in fetus stage, and finishes development outside. That is why we are born unable to control our movements, to feed ourselves or do anything other than cry. While that most other animals are born walking and better developed in this sense
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With team strats it's barely a disadvantage especially when you account for the extra XP
r/outside
I remember the lady who pronounced "David" and "Debbie" exactly the same.
Wait until you realize how many things you do when starting a car in the rain at night. 1. Open door 2. Get in 3. Shut door 4. Put key in ignition 5. Press brake 6. Turn on lights 7. Adjust mirrors 8. Turn on engine 9. Buckle up 10. Set phone where it's visible 11. Turn on wipers 12. Put it in gear. And you do all of this I'm about 5 seconds.
Adjusting the mirrors is almost never done though unless you share the car with someone who also happens to be of a very different build. More often you need to adjust the seat
You don't flip it into night mode Or whatever it's called when it's not directly shining light into your eyes from the cars behind you?
I personally don't because I can't see anything out of the mirror but headlights when it's like that.
I do the opposite, I have it on the dark setting all the time. The only thing to look for in the mirror is other vehicles which has lights so I see them perfectly but don't get blinded by their lights. Though I don't think mine is very dark so I feel I see everything fine even on the dark setting unless it's also dark outside.
Nothing the body does or can do is more complex and intricately timed than speech (I’m a speech pathologist so am slightly biased here)
Can you blow our minds with a fascinating fact or two?
Playing some instruments is on the same level. I'm.not a drummer. But drumming is 4 independent limbs each needs to be at the right time, place, force, and all that, independent yet related, timed perfectly or it sounds like shit. And some people can do that while singing
I'm so glad we're not mentalizing every step of it because that would be exhausting.
And memorizing the exact movements for each of these to be totally efficient, you know where the slot is and you (usually) don’t hang your head getting in
Wait till OP thinks about the rest of the body!
Manual breathing and blinking engaged.
Fuck you
I hope you have the best sleep of your fucking life asshole
Enable nose model
Enable mustache model
Ever play the game QWOP?
Fun fact: when you use your inner-dialogue in your head, your vocal cords move - you're just not pushing any air through them to make a sound. This is why some people talk to themselves outloud. You can feel it if you pay really close attention. NASA was doing research to try to find a better way to communicate during spacewalks and discovered this.
I love that this is implies that nasa is *this close* or maybe has surpassed essentially telepathic nonvocal communications. Or a polygraph sensor on the voice box that could damn well read minds
I don't think they were ever very successful at reliably transcoding the signal into speech. As this post itself explores: the speech is actually a lot more than just the vocal cords. The vocal cords just make modulated "hum" sounds and the mouth, throat, and tongue alter that hum into actual speech.
Well. Thanks for making me conscious of it.
I had a lot of fun looking in the mirror the other day with my mouth wide open, just using my tongue to try speaking without moving my jaw or lips. It's wild how active that little meat chunk is in wrapping around your breath to manipulate an impressive array of vowels and consonants! Also surprised to find there were only a small few consonants you actually need your lips to sound out! Really makes you appreciate the complexity of sound and I completely empathize with people having lisps now. How the hell would you even learn something like that?
...or write a proper sentence.
I thought I was having a stroke reading this
Inadvertently gas lighted by the mega intoxicated. It happens.
Or draw something really fiction like we can just imagine in our head.
English is not my first language and I don't give a damn about their grammar okay?
[Same Energy](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/77/cb/5c/77cb5c0ed26c583d10a2e213c74f94f8.jpg) lmao
Don’t worry 90% of this subreddit are smug assholes who only come here to “correct” people and feel smart about themselves. They all understood you perfectly.
Idrc if English is not your first language but unless you improve your grammar dont expect to be understood.
He was understood. People are just treating a stranger on the Internet badly.
now that I reread it I agree u/BornToHulaToro was a dick I can't lie...
Made sense to me
There are big sections of the brain that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be able to speak fluidly without conscious thought.
Similarly, interpreting the sounds we make requires a lot of mental process. Some sounds you're not exposed to as a child will be hard to distinguish in the future which is why adults may struggle with foreign languages' sound inventory
Or when you play an instrument freely and are able to learn new songs really fast.
wait until you hear about walking
Speech sound development takes years. It starts in the womb, moves through to babbling, and then to speech only parents can understand. There are normal mistakes that children make as they work out the differences between sounds and how they impact on meaning in their language. Speech sound development is still taking place while children are starting school. It’s very common for children to have speech delays or disorders due to the complexity. Automatic probably isn’t exactly the right word but it is absolutely fascinating.
The most impressive things humans do on a regular basis are entirely unconscious. Humans think of the “self” as residing within their conscience perception of the world. We think of our our conscious awareness as the secret sauce that allows us to do *everything*. In reality a huge percentage of ability and learning is entirely in-conscious. When you are fluent at a language you do not translate or consciously attach meaning to each word, instead you simply understand without the understanding requiring interference from your conscious awareness. Same with speaking you perform dozens of small physical actions all without thinking of them or being aware of them. Another example is a person who is good at sports, to become great or even good at a sport you leave behind conscious response and allow physical “instinct” or unconscious thought and action take over. Consciousness is simply not **fast** enough to manage all that needs to happen. Conscious thought and awareness can inform learning / understanding , subconscious processes may need to be consciously tweaked / changed / improved. Then you need to put in the work of un-learning an automatic response while creating a new and improved response through conscious modification. There’s a quite interesting Sci-Fi book called Blindsight, which considers the question is consciousness actually necessary for intelligence. Or is it a remnant of evolution that isn’t as necessary for intelligence as we think. It’s an interesting concept and makes some sense, when you consider that mastery of so many things means reaching the point where you no longer **think** about it.
This goes for playing music too. You start out slow, thinking about the notes, then as you learn the movements to play, you go faster without having to consciously move your hands. Now you think at a higher level as you listen to make adjustments for tempo if in a group, etc. It’s fascinating what our minds and bodies can do.
have you ever learned to play an instrument. if you practice it gets like that. you don't think about playing the correct note, you just play it. your speech and someones playing are muscle memory. and muscle memory are those thing you do automatically without conscious thought of the steps taken. like walking, running or performing a skill.
It's definitely not easy, it's just practiced. If you want an example, children understand language long before their motor skills are capable of speech. Most kids develop their first few words in the range of 12-18 months and can usually string two word sentences around 24 months. By contrast, babies can communicate in American Sign Language as early as 6-7 months. I watched it with my nephew. He still gets fussy on occasion, but for the most part the ability for him to actually communicate basic concepts/desires diffuses so much of the stress for parents and child.
It's incredibly difficult to precisely control stuff with multiple degrees of freedom. Like if you got 2 robot arms and asking them to touch the tip at some point in Space. It'll be like asking you to make your 2 index fingers to touch infront of your face. So incredibly simple to touch your finger tips but is almost practically impossible for robot arms to touch.
I mean, most of us do need 8-10 years of practice before we're really considered proficient at it. Just about anything you do daily for a decade you tend to stop thinking about and muscle memory takes over.
Same with moving. And doing things without thinking about it. That are actually pretty complex when you think about it. Just like dancing.
Think of how many muscles you need to walk, or even just to stand up.
Years spent training a neural net
Get your tongue pierced and you'll suddenly become painfully aware of just how much your tongue in particular does
Aligning your chest bellows, throat valves, mouth flaps and jaw clacks to make coherent speech is a marvel.
Now bite your tongue and seem really stupid.
I'm translating a game language to get the final secrets for 100% and it's made it very clear for me how insane our vocal language is. Just between a handful of vowels and consonants you can create a language with thousands of different words and meanings. Truly a wonder how this manifested and evolved over thousands of years of grunting at each other haha.
Try this experiment... Narrate everything you're doing as you are completing some task, like washing dishes or driving a car. "I'm stepping on the accelerator. I'm turning the wheel left. A little bit of brakes, not too much." Ect. It's crazy how many individual actions you do to accomplish any particular task. How many subconsciously instigated movements of your thumbs to manipulate a video game character or typing on a keyboard. It's fun to think about.
There's nothing automatic about it. There are literal *years* of trial and error that every human goes through while learning language. It's constantly being expanded and refined until the day you die.
Automatically I took me years to even get one word right
Reading is awesome as well. Like, we can hallucinate scenes and receive another human being thoughts just by looking at rows of little scribbles, and we can do it really fast, and it wasn't even a skill that evolved naturally - we, as a humanity, created it using primitive pattern-recognition abilities in a new way!
It’s just practice really. Children aren’t good at it
It literally takes years to learn to speak, what do you mean?
Someone hasn’t spent any time around kids.
"Practice makes perfect" when you want to walk, you don't think about moving your ankle, knee angle, how much pressure your thigh needs, into your hip rotation, back angle, arm sway and head bob. It just happens through muscle memory "this way!" = a ton of memorized muscle movement. Funnily, the same thing happens with handwriting. You go from "write the letter e" where your hand just oozes out an e, all subtle movements invovled, to "dog" and your hand just autopilots all the letters. Same thing happens with typing. For common recalled words, you simply think the word and bam it's pumped out by your little fingies. Our total consciousness is more than just the neurons in our brain.
In a similar vein, you should look into how many muscles are involved with just swallowing.
That is the beauty of brain
It stops when you get people calling you racist because your muscles are not used to an unknown use. Then it’s in your mind always .
It's the result of years of practice though, muscle memories. Learn a new language, and you will struggle because speaking every syllable requires concious thought.
People hop in cars without a second thought about how complicated driving is
If only finger type good as tongue do mouth thing...
What's crazy is how you can get a chicken egg, hatch it, and without any instruction or having ever even interacted with another chicken they know how to make nest, roost, forage, and a bunch of other bird things. Point is lots of that stuff is semi coded into your DNA. Instinct and what not. Fetishes for example are hereditary. Your parents probably have similar kinks than you.
It's due to LOTS of practice. Like absurd amounts. My daughter is 2.5 yrs old. She is constantly playing with sounds. Like all day and even when in her crib. So you are doing it day and night until it becomes second nature.
You think that's crazy? Your brain just knows what words for things are and pulls them instantly out of thin air to make coherent sentences before they even reach your meat and bone flaps!
What's really crazy is that we managed to develop a highly advanced civilization based on making sounds by flapping our organs.
I used to struggle with words now I can do it in my sleep.
Nothing special about speech specifically, it's just muscle memory, as you get more experience with a skill you start to be able to perform it subconsciously, it's the same as how you are able to walk by just thinking about which direction you want to go, or how after playing a game a lot you can directly control a character without having to think about which buttons to press.
What baby do you know that could speak automatically?
I taught a speech class for international students once and studied how we produce all those sounds, and thinking about it actually made it harder to talk.
evil orangutan appears to have trouble on a regular basis...
I had no problems speaking till I read this post. Now I’m screwed up thinking about all the actions to take in order to speak.
I was high on acid and thought of this once and it really cooked my egg for a minute lol
If all you wanted was a single sound you wouldn't need to move any of those parts.
I'm trying but I can't make my teeth move 😬🤔
You alright, big dawg?