Social interaction plays a major role in language development. If you take away the reinforcement of everyone being really excited when the baby goes "da-da" instead of "gur-gur" you would lose the learning. It's also much more difficult for blind babies to learn to speak because they can't see the mouth shapes being made by their parents which is a deliberate training exercise. I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment. IANAL (Linguist), IANAB.
> I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work either, but kids do learn the sounds of other animals and they love to reproduce them. Many kids can make dog or duck sounds before they can even speak like humans.
The problem is that of course, dogs, cats, ducks don't actually have a language, just a few different sounds, so that doesn't prove anything about kids' ability to understand a hypothetical actual animal language.
Re:Can We Talk to Whales?
by LectronPusher on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @11:53AM
(#37393469)
I'm quite unsure of myself here and might be mistaken, but there's also the chomskyist argument that much of the structure of human language is derived from the structure of our brain itself. Our brain is flexible enough to generate many types of human language, but different species could have entirely different structures that might be impossible to learn as a human. A machine translation layer -- LLMs or such -- could be designed around this flaw, and will likely be our best bet.
Think someone like the High Evolutionary as portrayed in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but limited to present day Earth technology and knowledge.
Suppose that villain took several human babies, gave them hearing aids or cochlear implants that pitch shift and compress whale/dolphin sounds down to where humans can hear them, and raised them in a mixed human/whale environment so that from their first weeks they were seeing whales and hearing while speech as much they were seeing humans and hearing human speech.
Would some of those human babies end up learning to understand whale the same way babies raised in bilingual extended families often end up learning both languages?