【推荐1】Phonetic (语音的) information-the smallest sound elements of speech, typically represented by the alphabet-is considered by many linguists (语言学家) to be the foundation of language. Infants are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic information helps babies learn language by emphasizing the boundaries of individual words and is effective even in the first few months of life

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin investigated babies' ability to process phonetic information during their first year. The study found that phonetic information wasn't successfully encoded until babies were seven months old, and was still rare for babies at 11 months old when they began to say their first words. A sister study has shown that rhythmic information was processed by babies at two months old -and individual differences predicted later language outcomes.

Professor Giovanni Di Liberto said, “This is the first evidence we have of how brain activity relates to phonetic information changes over time in response to continuous speech.” Previously, studies have relied on comparing the responses to nonsense syllables, like "bif" and “bof” instead.

“We believe that rhythmic information is the hidden glue underpinning the development of a well-functioning language system,” said Cambridge “Infants can use rhythmic information like a scaffold or skeleton to add phonetic information on to. For example, they might learn that the rhythm pattern of English words is typically strong-weak, as in 'daddy' or 'mummy', with the stress on the first syllable. They can use this rhythm pattern to guess where one word ends and another begins when listening to natural speech.”

Goswami says that there is a long history in trying to explain dyslexia (阅读理解) and developmental language disorder in terms of phonetic problems, but the evidence doesn't add up. She believes that individual differences in children's language originate with rhythm.

【推荐3】Australian bioacoustics (生物声学) expert Brian Miller’s work focuses on identifying and understanding the behaviours of Antarctic marine mammals by listening to underwater audio recordings. However, sorting through it is a massive task. “We’ve now amassed a collection of more than 100,000 hours of recordings from the Antarctic, but we’ve always been constrained by our ability to process these data efficiently,” he says. Listening to all these recordings would take decades. As well as being boring to do, that’s simply too slow for the conservation action needed to save threatened species.

But with new technologies doing the “thinking” for us, that could be about to change. A time-saving solution has been for Brian’s team to apply AI algorithms to the task.

Using computers to process data isn’t new to conservation research, but in the past, they’ve been limited in what they can accomplish. They start to struggle when the data gets more complicated. In comparison, AI programs can learn and improve their ability to interpret data. They can process data that would take a research team months to finish, in a matter of hours. In some cases, they are more accurate than their human counterparts, and the algorithms only improve with time as they gather more and more training data.

Of course, the human element can never be entirely removed from research. “It’s people who can work closely with people who have AI experience, and have the ability to make the algorithm smarter…I think that’s a pretty good recipe for success,” Brian says.

Perhaps the best thing about the use of AI in conservation is that it lets researchers focus on what’s important. “This frees us up to think about the bigger picture problems. It frees us up to think about designing better studies to focus on the analysis, to focus on the gaps… it really is a revolution,” Brian says. “My prediction would be that this is going to become much more widespread across science in general.”