undefined | Better HN

0 pointstzs11y ago0 comments

> Could we expect a child to learn to speak if they only heard recordings of existing speech with otherwise no human interaction/feedback - correcting them or offering customized and contextual new bits of information?

I once asked a similar question on some online forum [1] where many linguists hung out. My question was if an English-only speaking household left a general interest Spanish language TV station on most of the time when they weren't actively using the TV to watch something, so that their child received a very large exposure to Spanish language programming (news, sports, soap operas, sitcoms, movies, etc) from birth onward, would the child naturally learn Spanish?

I don't recall for sure what the linguists who responded said, but I think they all said the child would not learn Spanish from this.

[1] I have no recollection of where this was.

0 comments

5 comments · 3 top-level

spdionis11y ago· 2 in thread

When I was little (5-7 years old) I had quite a few anime videos and magazines in italian sent to me by my parents who were abroad. Where I lived no one knew a single word of italian. I often watched and rewatched those videos and read those magazines without any other external input. I can tell you that doing that I easily learned the language. When I was 8 years old I also left for Italy and in two weeks of time I already started speaking fluently, albeit with a few mistakes.

If the child will actually watch the Spanish TV he will learn the language.

EDIT: Even now I often learn new japanese words (and remember them) just by watching animes. The difference is that now I have english subtitles but back then I had no subtitles, only the images to help me understand the meaning.

digikata11y ago

But this is a little different, in the AI we want the ability to form syntactically correct sentences, but also some intelligence behind the sentences too. You as a human had another foundation of intelligence to lean on, your native language, and an understanding of the world outside of learning the Italian language. If you had no other human interaction, would you have learned any language? That's the more the situation of these AI algorithms.

spdionis11y ago

I was only arguing that the child could actually learn Spanish, nothing more.

Not knowing basically anything about AI state of the art what stops us from feeding a RNN image data and text data and make it correlate them automatically by context? Just like a child learns words by hearing them many times in similar contexts so could a RNN.

I imagine the biggest problem is gathering and structuring the data. We humans receive lots of data and have lots of time to process it in our lives compared. And by lots I mean difference of a few orders of magnitude. It's amazing what this thing learns in just a few hours of processing.

1 more reply

geomark11y ago

I've seen something like this in action with young kids who are given a tablet and stumble upon cartoons they like on YouTube, but in a different language. After they watch a few cartoons, YouTube's recommender system keeps offering them more cartoons in that language. And it isn't long before they start spouting words and phrases in that language.

dzhiurgis11y ago

In Baltic states, majority of TV content either comes in native German or is US shows translated to Russian.

I've picked up quite a bit of Russian by watching Discovery channel this way.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse