ABSTRACT
Language is so readily acquired and so universal in human affairs that it is easy to forget what a complex phenomenon it is. Despite years of research, we still understand remarkably little about how language works. Consider the problems there have been in developing computers that can process human language. What an advantage it would be to have an automatic system that could listen to a person talking and translate their speech into a written form—a combined Dictaphone and word processor that did all the work of an audio-typist. Technology is now advancing to the stage where this kind of machine is possible, but it has taken more than 30 years of intensive research to achieve this goal, and the best contemporary speech recognition devices are less good than a four-year-old child at recognising a stream of continuous speech spoken by an unfamiliar speaker. Suppose, though, we try to crack a different problem: rather than getting a machine to recognise spoken words, let us present it with ready-typed sentences, and see if it can decode meaning well enough to translate from one language to another. Here too, enormous effort has been expended in trying to achieve a solution, yet the results so far are unimpressive (see Machine translation, overleaf). One thing that makes language comprehension such an intriguing topic is that it is something that computers are relatively bad at, despite their enormous power and speed of operation. Against this background, it is all the more remarkable that nearly all children soak up language in the first few years of life, apparently requiring only a modest amount of linguistic stimulation in order to develop, by the age of four years or so, into language users who are far more competent than the most sophisticated computer.
