Babies babble with acquired accents | Hacker News Reader

Babies babble with acquired accents

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72 pointsgumby38 comments

I only have a small sample size, but when I was in South Africa adopting one of my children, I noticed that South African children cried very differently from American ones — the sound my kid made crying was quite unique, and I thought it was unique to him, but one day, a thousand miles from where we adopted him, still in country, I heard a sound exactly like him crying, I thought it was him, and .. it was a neighbour’s kid. Ever since then I’ve wondered how common ‘accents’ show in children at pre-verbal stages. Very interesting!

there's probably quite a lot we unconsciously pick up from others, even things we think are uniquely "ours"

For example, when I first heard a deaf person laughing or talking, I probably internally noticed how... different the sound was. I'm guessing most hearing-abled people have a similar experience. It's very... unfiltered? It made me wonder how much even my own laugh was sculpted by my environment. If I relax my voice, I notice my voice becoming much more booming and obnoxious than my "normal" speaking voice.

Anecdotally, I've noticed Japanese people are much more likely to have a sort of stifled, raspy, restrained laugh, even when they're in a situation I might expect an American to have a belly laugh.

A lot of cultural values are encoded in language too, and in turn, the languages we speak can affect how we think or interact. Anecdotally, my personality is a bit different depending on what language I speak. I think the concept of what's actually encoded in language is being explored with regards to how/why LLMs "feel" smarter than they really ought to, or seem to show intelligence beyond simple "stochastic parroting"

Somewhat more obviously, most people will "code switch" not only their language, but vocal tone or even demeanor, depending on our current "persona" or our audience. Recently, Paris Hilton entertainingly demonstrated this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU

And this is more of a half-baked personal speculation based on a scattering of theories and case studies, but the environments we live in, the narratives we expose ourselves to, the people we surround ourselves with all probably very heavily define a lot of our values, beliefs, and even personal preferences, to an extent that would disturb a lot of people. Self-serving biases, post-hoc justifications, and confabulations give us convenient and creative ways to validate our own free will, volition, and independence, but I often wonder how much of our supposedly great human intelligence is an uncomfortably thin veneer on a largely automatic pattern-absorbing sponge.

In what way would you say it was different? I'm asking as I'm South African, but I'd have to start digging online to find an American baby crying.

This makes me wonder if my 19 month old child has any distinguishable accent, since she has a Dutch-speaking father, a German-speaking mother (who both speak English to each other), a Syrian baby-sitter, and she goes to a Swedish-speaking preschool. She understands all of us in our own languages, and usually replies with words in the "correct" language to each person.

That's an interesting mixture!

I know our child with only English and Finnish-speaking parents always preferred to reply in the local language (Finnish) for a long time. He would understand English questions and conversation, but if I said "Do you want to go outside?" the answer would be "Ei!" (no).

It took a year or so before he was consistent in replying to speakers in the appropriate language, and even then sometimes the languages would get mixed up , mid-sentence at times.

Even now I think it is apparent that Finnish is his real native language. Although his English is basically perfect there are rare lapses in grammar that make it obvious he's constructed the sentence in Finnish and translated to English rather literally.

Yes, you can detect Finglish working its way in. Finnish overloads verbs with multiple semantics more than English does, and it sets off the Faulty English Detector.

Mostly, when he's tired or distracted, I hear questions like "Where the cat is?" instead of "Where is the cat?", or "What the clock is?" rather than "What is the time?"

I can see where both of those come from, but 95% of the time he asks questions "properly". I realized recently it has been years since he got a persons gender wrong - that was a hard one for him to learn, as with all Finnish people, but it seems to have finally sunk in.

Some errors in English come straight from Finnish, and only sheer quantity of exposure can overcome them I guess.

And consider one of the more subtle English constructions - when to use "so" or "such" with an adjective or adverb. This might be the most common error I see from Finns, and again, perhaps only sheer exposure - esp. written English - might cure it.

We got a Turkish/Greek rescue ~ 3 years ago. Wildly intelligent, can follow simple commands in both languages but prefers to protest in Greek (oi!) and switches to Turkish whenever she wants something (isterim!)

A rescue child?

I've only ever heard "rescue" used for shelter animals, and everything made sense until "both languages."

Then I was really amazed to hear about your talking dog, and after a few reads I'm still not sure what you rescued.

Also, "can follow simple commands"?!?

Maybe the dog barks in Greek but begs in Turkish?

I too am highly perplexed

(I'm just poking fun at some of the parent comments who talk about their children like pet commodities)

A bit of the same here, I'm Dutch with a Swedish/French wife with whom I speak English. She speaks Swedish to our children, I speak Dutch. Both of them go (youngest) and went (oldest) to the French school in Göteborg which follows the Swedish curriculum but adds a heavy dose of French language and culture to the mix, the oldest now studies English language/literature in Utrecht, the Netherlands. At home we're tri-lingual - Swedish, Dutch and English - with French added as an extra.

I grew up in South Africa but watched and absorbed a lot of American and British English from television. As a result whenever I speak English to locals they'll ask me where I'm from.

They usually explain and say that I still definitely sound as if I'm local, but they can't place exactly where from and/or why I sound wrong. My best guess is that the different influences randomizes some overlaps in words, tonality etc.

Either way I don't think its bad and it's usually a good conversation starter.

I live in an area where the prevailing accent is a flat US midwestern one, and watching Bluey has led my toddler to derhoticize her R's some of the time. (The sound ends up like a muddled Australian-Boston mix.) I assume the reverse happens all the time with kids from other countries who see American TV, but it's something amusing that I didn't expect. Her mom and I are both unable to roll R's, so I wonder if playing a lot of Spanish audio will help her be able to do so.

Babies only learn to roll their Rs when four years old, where the phoneme is present in the language.

So likely no :)

Or even later! I had to be taught this about age 6, while some never learn the trick.

I heard of the same phenomenon happening with Peppa Pig: American kids all of the sudden acquiring British accents after watching the cartoon for a long enough time.

Yep it will.

> I wonder if playing a lot of Spanish audio will help her be able to do so.

TL;DR: possibly, but they also learn to speak Spanish a little bit if you want to be really sure.

Well, apparently babies start out being able to distinguish all sounds human languages make, and lose the ability to distinguish them as they specialize in the ones that the people in their surroundings speak (same with distinguishing human faces actually). And if a child grows up multi-lingual, especially if it is very early in their development, the ability to distinguish the sounds will "stick" even if they stop using the language.

I actually have some personal experience with that. According to my parents I spoke Spanish (among other languages) with the nuns running the hospital in Ghana, where my parents worked when I was a toddler. Then we returned to the Netherlands when I was almost four. This is right around the time childhood amnesia[0] is doing its thing. So I completely forgot how to speak Spanish, as well as the local Ghanaian languages that I allegedly also I spoke.

A few decades later, and completely unaware of this childhood experience, I dated a Spanish-Dutch woman, who also studied Spanish at the university. One time she got a Spanish joke book at her birthday party from her friends. So I said "I'm going to torture your ears with my horrible fake Spanish accent now". One (sadly, horribly unfunny) joke reading later the reaction was "is the joke that your fake Spanish sounds better than most second-year students in our bachelor?" And they were serious about it too.

(Another decade later I dated a Spanish woman who said that my Spanish accent still was pretty off, but of course she didn't have the horrible accent of Dutch first- and second-year students of Spanish as a comparison point. She approved of my rolling Rs though)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia

These types of videos are great.

Here was a comment on another one that I feels sums it up nicely:

> @braxy29: baby doesn’t have clear words yet, but he has body language and gesture, eye contact, prosody, shared attention, the give and take pacing of interaction. baby has picked up a good deal about how casual, comfortable conversation with the guys or a close family member works!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GNh5EOBC-lA

https://youtu.be/CejhQC9hUO8

https://lemmy.world/post/17261680

Isn't the baby Spanish and not Italian in the first video?

Yeah, I think the uploader titled that video wrong. The mother is speaking Spanish (I guess the baby could still be Italian).

I remember being in France with my 18 month old daughter, who couldn't speak much at the moment¥ but for some reason picked up the French way of speaking and started parodying it.

¥ She only learned to say "yes" towards the end of the trip, which made conversations possible; because it's quite hard to converse with someone who can only say "no".

I remember a few months of our child only saying "No". If you asked "Would you like ice-cream" the reply would be a smile and a head-nod. There was no spoken "Yes", but if the question could be answered with "No" then it was.

Weird. But kinda adorable too.

  > it's quite hard to converse with someone who can only say "no".

I can see you haven't been divorced yet.

divorce makes the conversation easier?

Divorce raises the bar for what one consideres a difficult conversation.

How is this science? Of course they babble in the language and accent that they are exposed to... What else would it be?

Well, at 19 months old, sure it's obvious. What may not be so obvious is just how early they start acquiring the accent. Don't quote me on this, but I believe babies can lose the ability to distinguish the sounds of different languages as early as six months.

It's like a Markov Chain, sounds as if it were language but it's not.

I think at some level in their heads there is an intent to convey some kind of meaning, but it doesn’t get through the layers of forming (correct) phonemes and grammatically sane phrases. It’s not like little kids don’t have thoughts and feelings before they’re able to articulate them, and merely create random noises, but more of a gradual process of learning to create those coherent and correct articulations.

video is in the BBC link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdd9x0ww4do

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