On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Darren Cook <[email protected]> wrote: >> An interesting line from this article on pattern matching, including >> computer Go: >> ... >> http://news.csu.edu.au//director/latestnews.cfm?itemID=C712563AEEA8398B7655D520C442F510&printtemplate=release > > A nice article; curiously the issues I had with it are almost the > opposite of the ones Mark Boon had. > > > “It's a bit like acquiring a good accent in a foreign > language. At quite a young age, the sounds of one's > first language get set and are very difficult to > change later. > > > I suspect this is just a myth. I've been fortunate to meet many adult > learners of languages who have mastered the accent. Native English > speakers learning the hard languages of Japanese and Chinese. And native > Japanese speakers learning English.
Well, it might not be an irrefutable theory, but it's a lot more than just a myth. Linguists and neuroscientists have been studying the issue for decades. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis . My first language is Spanish. I lived in Brazil from the ages of 5 to 8 and although I spoke Spanish the vast majority of the time, I have essentially no accent in Brazilian Portuguese. I've been living in the US for 12 years now, I am married to an American and I still have an accent in English. I have a lot more circumstantial evidence to think that there is some truth to the idea that it's much easier to learn new phonemes when you are a kid. > I think the reason most adult learners of foreign languages tend to > speak with a heavy accent is simply that they don't put the effort in. > I.e. they are adults, they need to communicate in that language as > adults, and don't have time to mess around investing the time to get > perfect. They stop at the point where they are understood. That's a vast oversimplification. > More evidence that adult learners can learn new accents: the existence > of impressionists. Impressionists like Debussy or like Degas? Or perhaps you mean "impersonators"? :) Álvaro. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
