From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 10:24:44 MDT
As an addendum to Damiens excellent post, I just found this in the
latest PNAS:
PNAS | July 22, 2003 | vol. 100 | no. 15 | 9085-9089
Resolving the question of color naming universals
Paul Kay and Terry Regier ¶
The existence of cross-linguistic universals in color naming is
currently contested. Early empirical studies, based principally on
languages of industrialized societies, suggested that all languages may
draw on a universally shared repertoire of color categories. Recent
work, in contrast, based on languages from nonindustrialized societies,
has suggested that color categories may not be universal. No
comprehensive objective tests have yet been conducted to resolve this
issue. We conduct such tests on color naming data from languages of both
industrialized and nonindustrialized societies and show that strong
universal tendencies in color naming exist across both sorts of
language.
Another fun paper in same issue, slightly related:
Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure
and social interaction on phonetic learning
Patricia K. Kuhl *, Feng-Ming Tsao and Huei-Mei Liu
Infants acquire language with remarkable speed, although little is known
about the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition process. Studies of
the phonetic units of language have shown that early in life, infants
are capable of discerning differences among the phonetic units of all
languages, including native- and foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and
12 mo of age, the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic
units sharply declines. In two studies, we investigate the necessary and
sufficient conditions for reversing this decline in foreign-language
phonetic perception. In Experiment 1, 9-mo-old American infants were
exposed to native Mandarin Chinese speakers in 12 laboratory sessions. A
control group also participated in 12 language sessions but heard only
English. Subsequent tests of Mandarin speech perception demonstrated
that exposure to Mandarin reversed the decline seen in the English
control group. In Experiment 2, infants were exposed to the same
foreign-language speakers and materials via audiovisual or audio-only
recordings. The results demonstrated that exposure to recorded Mandarin,
without interpersonal interaction, had no effect. Between 9 and 10 mo of
age, infants show phonetic learning from live, but not prerecorded,
exposure to a foreign language, suggesting a learning process that does
not require long-term listening and is enhanced by social interaction.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 10:29:03 MDT