Carnegie Mellon University's Lori Holt and Sung-Joo Lim and
Stockholm University's Francisco Lacerda are using video game
training with a mock "alien" language to replicate the
challenges of learning languages as an infant. The research
found that listeners were to quick recognize word-like units.
The study was funded by grants from the National Science
Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond. To uncover how spoken sounds are decoded by the
brain, the research team designed a video game narrated in
deliberately distorted speech. The soundtrack (unintelligible
babble in any language) was the only source of instruction for
the 77 adult players in the study. After only two hours of play,
the participants could reliably extract world-length sound
categories from continuous alien sounds and apply that learning
to advance through the game. "Traditionally, when we study adult
learning in the lab, it's nothing like how infants learn
language," said Holt, professor of psychology at CMU