Wayne,
> I really enjoy this sort of thing, too. The similarities between sounds
like
> 'p' and 'b' or 'l' and 'r' (or 'f' and 'v' and 'w') also help explain the
> characteristic accents of various nationalities (such as the Oriental
> tendency to switch 'l' and 'r' in English words).
Because you said that you enjoy this kind of thing, I thought that you might
also like these two articles from last year's NY Times.
I was going to send this material to you earlier, when you first wrote, but
the NY Times archive was down all day today.
Best,
Wirt
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April 20, 1999
Old Brains Can Learn New Language Tricks
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Pity the Japanese tourist asking for directions in New York City: "Which way
to Times Square?"
The answer might be: "Turn left after the next light."
The next what? Does that mean traffic signal or the next street turning off
to the right? To the typical native speaker of Japanese, right and light are
hopelessly confused because the English sounds "L" and "R" are
indistinguishable. But they won't be confused for long. In a fascinating set
of experiments, researchers at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
in Pittsburgh have found a way to teach native speakers of Japanese to hear
the difference between L and R reliably after just one hour of training.
The new findings are "extremely compelling," said Dr. Edward Jones, a
neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis and president of the
Cognitive Neuroscience Society, who is familiar with the research. They shed
light on how the adult brain changes, a phenomenon called plasticity, and on
mechanisms that make it resistant to change.
Dr. Helen Neville, a leading expert on brain plasticity at the University of
Oregon in Eugene, called the experiments "cool." They show that the adult
brain is capable of substantial change, even late in life, she said.
The research is being conducted by Dr. Jay McClelland and his colleagues at
the Pittsburgh center, a joint program of Carnegie Mellon University and the
University of Pittsburgh. McClelland, the center's co-director, has long been
interested in how the brain learns and, sometimes more importantly, how it
fails to learn.
He presented his findings last week at the annual meeting of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Society, which was held in Washington.
The brain presents a puzzle, McClelland said, in that many kinds of learning
continue or even improve throughout adulthood, but others, like the speech
sounds of a language, appear to slow almost to a stop. Few people can learn a
second language without an accent after the age of 10.
Scientists call this 10-year window a critical period for acquiring the
sounds of a language. But what is the neural basis of this critical period?
Clues are found in the way brain cells connect and influence one another. In
test tube experiments, scientists take two nerve cells that are connected by
a kind of cable called an axon. When the first cell is induced to fire an
electric pulse down its axon, the second cell also fires. Soon, physical
changes develop in both cells so that the first one almost always makes the
second one fire. This is how information is passed throughout the brain in a
process known as Hebbian learning.
Early on, brain cells are not well connected, McClelland said. But when
experiences from the outside world begin to flow into the brain, cells begin
to fire, and Hebbian patterns get stamped in. As neuroscientists are fond of
saying, cells that fire together, wire together, forming circuits.
Later, a cell may come into direct contact with cells from another circuit,
but if it is committed to what it has learned, it will not respond even to
very strong stimulation from those other cells. In other words, it fails to
learn.
This model of Hebbian learning can be applied to the sounds of human
language, McClelland said. Newborn babies can discriminate all the sounds of
every language in the world. It is as if there were a space inside their
brains that is a blank slate, waiting for sounds to enter.
When the sounds of the native language come pouring in, each sound induces
some cells to wire up and become dedicated to its peculiar frequency.
Thus, there are clumps of cells that are tuned to the Finnish "O," the
Spanish "D" or the English "Th" -- all of which are difficult for non-native
speakers to hear or pronounce. Within a short time, the baby's ability to
distinguish all sounds fades away.
Babies in English-speaking families have cells dedicated to hearing both L
and R, whereas Japanese babies have only one phonetic category for a similar
sound, McClelland said. To an American, the single Japanese R sound, as in
the word riokan, meaning guest room, sounds rather like a D, he said. In any
case, as the children in both cultures grow up, their sound categories become
more sharply defined.
The brain has a relatively small amount of neural tissue dedicated to speech
sounds, McClelland said, and so carves up that space with strong boundaries.
Sounds are stamped in early because the baby needs them to build the
foundation for language comprehension. Thus, Hebbian processes come in early
and lock in speech sound circuits. In other parts of the brain, Hebbian
processes continue, but those circuits can be more flexible, he said.
An adult learns to speak a second language by making new connections in many
circuits but cannot supplant the locked-in native sound system with the new
sounds of the second language.
Moreover, the unfamiliar sounds of a foreign language actually reinforce the
sound system of one's native language, McClelland said. When a Japanese
speaker comes to America, every time he hears an English L or R, his single
Japanese R phoneme is activated. Instead of becoming more flexible, his
ability to hear L and R diminishes with increasing exposure to English.
The challenge, McClelland said, is to carve out two spaces in the Japanese
speaker's brain when he has only one space for the L and R sounds. If the
critical period is over forever, he said, this should be impossible. But if
some plasticity or malleability remains, there should be a way to override
the embedded circuits using Hebbian learning.
Thirty-four native Japanese speakers came to the Pittsburgh laboratory, where
they were given headphones through which they heard pairs of words -- road
and load, light and right, and so on -- under one of two conditions.
In one condition, subjects heard regular speech. They had to say or guess
when they heard an L-word or R-word by tapping a response into a laptop
computer.
In the second condition, subjects heard the same words exaggerated by a
computer, so that each sound's peculiar frequency or formant was accentuated.
As their ability to distinguish L and R words improved, the words were
presented in regular speech. Finally, they heard the words in sloppy or
degraded speech so that even native speakers would have to listen hard to
hear the difference.
The subjects, all of whom had great trouble with L and R before training,
used the computer for three 20-minutes sessions, involving hundreds of word
pairs, McClelland said. No feedback was offered, to make conditions resemble
the real world.
Those who heard natural speech barely improved and some actually got worse,
McClelland said. But those who heard the exaggerated speech with gradual
training toward more natural speech all improved greatly. After one hour,
they could clearly distinguish light and right.
At this point, the successful subjects do not generalize what they have
learned to all L and R sounds, he said. But the experiment is just beginning.
If they go on to train on numerous pairs of words, they may be able to
retrain their entire sound system. It appears that they have begun to carve
out new, independent circuits for the L and R sounds.
This approach may be effective for retraining other embedded circuits, like
those that underlie racial prejudices or stereotypes, McClelland said. For
example, some people react with fear when they see a stranger, based simply
on his dress or skin color. That response may be stamped in. "We could think
about ways of structuring situations to present a stimulus that would
originally elicit the fear response and then teach the brain to have a
different reaction," he said.
And it can definitely be used for second language training.
During the World War II, American soldiers fighting the Japanese infantry
adopted the password "lollapalooza," figuring no Japanese speaker could
pronounce it. So much for that idea.
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November 13, 1999
Discovery of Egyptian Inscriptions Indicates an Earlier Date for Origin of
the Alphabet
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
On the track of an ancient road in the desert west of the Nile, where
soldiers, couriers and traders once traveled from Thebes to Abydos,
Egyptologists have found limestone inscriptions that they say are the
earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.
Their discovery is expected to help fix the time and place for the origin of
the alphabet, one of the foremost innovations of civilization.
Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with
Egyptian influences, has been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 B.C.,
two or three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of a nascent
alphabet. The first experiments with alphabet thus appeared to be the work of
Semitic people living deep in Egypt, not in their homelands in the
Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought.
Although the two inscriptions have yet to be translated, other evidence at
the discovery site supports the idea of the alphabet as an invention by
workaday people that simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the
elite hands of official scribes. As such, alphabetic writing was
revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press
much later.
Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand by which fewer than 30
symbols, each one representing a single sound, could be combined to form
words for a wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually replaced
writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics in which hundreds of pictographs,
or idea pictures, had to be mastered.
"These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, considerably earlier than
anyone had thought likely," Dr. John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale
University, said last week in an interview about the discovery.
"They seem to provide us with evidence to tell us when the alphabet itself
was invented, and just how."
Dr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah, a Ph.D. student in Egyptology, made the
find while conducting a survey of ancient travel routes in the desert of
southern Egypt, across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the pharaohs'
tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the 1993-94 season, they came upon walls
of limestone marked with graffiti at the forlorn Wadi el-Hol, roughly
translated as Gulch of Terror.
Last summer, the Darnells returned to the wadi with several specialists in
early writing. A report on their findings will be given in Boston on Nov. 22
at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.
Working in the baking June heat "about as far out in the middle of nowhere as
I ever want to be," Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic
Research Project at the University of Southern California, assisted the
investigation by taking detailed pictures of the inscriptions for analysis
using computerized photointerpretation techniques. "This is fresh meat for
the alphabet people," he said.
"Because of the early date of the two inscriptions and the place they were
found," said Dr. P. Kyle McCarter Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at
Johns Hopkins University. "it forces us to reconsider a lot of questions
having to do with the early history of the alphabet. Things I wrote only two
years ago I now consider out of date."
Dr. Frank M. Cross, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern languages and
culture at Harvard University, who was not a member of the research team but
who has examined the evidence, judged the inscriptions "clearly the oldest of
alphabetic writing and very important." He said that enough of the symbols in
the inscriptions were identical or similar to later Semitic alphabetic
writing to conclude that "this belongs to a single evolution of the
alphabet."
The previously oldest evidence for an alphabet, dated about 1600 B.C., was
found near or in Semitic-speaking territory, in the Sinai Peninsula and
farther north in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the ancient
Canaanites. These examples, known as Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite
alphabetic inscriptions, were the basis for scholars' assuming that Semites
developed the alphabet by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs, but
doing this in their own lands and not in Egypt itself.
From other, nonalphabetic writing at the site, the Egyptologists determined
that the inscriptions were made during Egypt's Middle Kingdom in the first
two centuries of the second millennium B.C. And another discovery in June by
the Darnells seemed to establish the presence of Semitic people at the wadi
at the time of the inscriptions.
Surveying a few hundred yards from the site, the Darnells found an
inscription in nonalphabetic Egyptian that started with the name of a certain
Bebi, who called himself "general of the Asiatics." This was a term used for
nearly all foreigners, most of whom were Semites, and many of them served as
mercenary soldiers for Egyptian rulers at a time of raging civil strife or
came as miners and merchants. Another reference to this Bebi has been found
in papyrus records.
"This gives us 99.9 percent certainty," Dr. Darnell said of the conclusion
that early alphabetic writing was developed by Semitic-speaking people in an
Egyptian context. He surmised that scribes in the troops of mercenaries
probably developed the simplified writing along the lines of a semicursive
form of Egyptian commonly used in the Middle Kingdom in graffiti. Working
with Semitic speakers, the scribes simplified the pictographs of formal
writing and modified the symbols into an early form of alphabet.
"It was the accidental genius of these Semitic people who were at first
illiterate, living in a very literate society," Dr. McCarter said,
interpreting how the alphabet may have arisen. "Only a scribe trained over a
lifetime could handle the many different types of signs in the formal
writing. So these people adopted a crude system of writing within the
Egyptian system, something they could learn in hours, instead of a lifetime.
It was a utilitarian invention for soldiers, traders, merchants."
The scholars who have examined the short Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are having
trouble deciphering the messages, though they think they are close to
understanding some letters and words. "A few of these signs just jump out at
you, at anyone familiar with proto-Sinaitic material," said Dr. F. W.
Dobbs-Allsopp, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New
Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and history of the Middle East.
"They look just like one would expect."
The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line derived
from the hieroglyphic sign for water and almost identical to the symbol for M
in later Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is less certain. The
figure of a stick man, with arms raised, appears to have developed into an H
in the alphabet, for reasons unknown.
Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that eventually evolved
from the image of an ox head into A and from a house, which looks more like a
9 here, into the Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and transitions of A and B
are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet
as further developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites, was passed to
the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th century B.C. and certainly by the
9th century B.C. From the Greeks the simplified writing system entered
Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination word for the Greek A and
B, alpha and beta.
The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think they understand are,
reading right to left, the title for a chief in the beginning and a reference
to a god at the end.
If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins of
alphabetic writing well before the probable time of the biblical story of
Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars
said. The Semites involved in the alphabet invention would have been part of
an earlier population of alien workers in Egypt.
Although it is still possible that the Semites took the alphabet idea with
them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of Johns Hopkins said that the considerable
evidence of Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary writing of a
similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely.
The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in
the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely
pictographic until about 1400 B.C. The Sumerians are generally credited with
the first invention of writing, around 3200 B.C., but some recent findings at
Abydos in Egypt suggest a possibly earlier origin there. The issue is still
controversial.
For Dr. Darnell, though, it is exciting enough to learn that in a forsaken
place like Wadi el-Hol, along an old desert road, people showed they had
taken a major step in written communication. He is returning to the site next
month for further exploration.
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