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May 10, 2008
Our Mother's Voice
Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke "asked whether infants and young children show visual and social preferences for speakers of their native language." Using the biblical story of Shibboleth in Judges 12:5–6 as an epigraph, they report on four experiments that seek to answer this question. Check out their study and see how they conducted the experiments at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it's free. Here are their conclusions:
Although much remains to be learned about the origins and development of social categories and preferences, our findings support three suggestions concerning the nature and development of social group preferences. First, language provides a cue to social preferences, even in infants who have not begun to produce or understand speech. Second, the tendency to favor otherwise unfamiliar members of one's own social group begins to emerge early in human life and well before children begin to learn about the nature and history of social-group conflicts. The passage from infants' social preferences to adults' social conflicts may be long and circuitous, but such a path may exist and may explain, in part, why conflicts among different language and social groups are pervasive and difficult to eradicate. Third, because human languages vary, and the native language must be learned, the tendency to make social distinctions is shaped by experience. Because language learning is especially adaptable early in development, social preferences also may be malleable at young ages. This early adaptability of preference formation for familiar characteristics of individuals may obtain for many potential indicators of social group membership. Attempts to reduce human social conflicts therefore may be enhanced by an understanding of their developmental origins.
I don't think their results all that surprising and their suggestion for reducing "human social conflicts" seems trite. But I do find their result interesting in the light of an article I discussed back in early 2006. That article in the Economist, based on work by Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that the human mind was a kind of Bayesian machine. I repeat a couple quotations from that previous post,
The key to successful Bayesian reasoning is not in having an extensive, unbiased sample, which is the eternal worry of frequentists, but rather in having an appropriate “prior”, as it is known to the cognoscenti. This prior is an assumption about the way the world works—in essence, a hypothesis about reality—that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude happen.
How the priors are themselves constructed in the mind has yet to be investigated in detail. Obviously they are learned by experience, but the exact process is not properly understood. Indeed, some people suspect that the parsimony of Bayesian reasoning leads occasionally to it going spectacularly awry, with whatever process it is that forms the priors getting further and further off-track rather than converging on the correct distribution.
Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke's paper may provide a clue to how and when early "priors" are constructed. They may start with the sound of our mother's voice.
Via Mixed Memory where Chris correctly asks, "Does the Foundation of Prejudice Lie in Native Language?"
Posted by Duane Smith at May 10, 2008 2:22 PM | Read more on Science - General |
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