From the August 2002 Scientific American Magazine | 0 comments

From Mouth to Mind ( Preview )

New insights into how language warps the brain

By W. Wayt Gibbs

NEURAL NETWORK, when trained on the sounds of American speech, devotes lots of cells to distinguishing /r/ from /l/. But when trained on Japanese phonemes, the neurons organize so that a few cells are sensitive to the dominant frequencies (called F2 and F3) that differ between /r/ and /l/.

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"Liver." The word rises from the voice box and passes the lips. It beats the air, enters an ear canal, sets nerve cells firing. Electrochemical impulses stream into the auditory cortex of a listener's brain. But then what? How does the brain's neural machinery filter that complex stream of auditory input to extract the uttered word: "liver"--or was it "river," or perhaps "lever"?

Researchers at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in June reported brain imaging studies and clinical experiments that expose new details of how the first language we learn warps everything we hear later. Some neuroscientists think they are close to explaining, at a physical level, why many native Japanese speakers hear "liver" as "river," and why it is so much easier to learn a new language as a child than as an adult.

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