1. PRELINGUISTIC SPEECH PROCESSING

Question 1

components of language

Answer 1

phonology: comprised of small units that are combined

semantics: conveys meaning

Question 2

what is “syntax”?

Answer 2

• rules about how words go together

e.g., english: subject - verb - object

Question 3

preference studies

Answer 3

with no training, what do infants want to listen (or look) to

Question 4

habituation/familiarisation studies

Answer 4

first, we train infants and then measure what they prefer

Question 5

change detection studies

Answer 5

we train infants to respond to a change (can infants tell the difference between 2 things)

Question 6

prosody

Answer 6

• the pattern of stress and intonation in a language
• languages have different prosodic patterns

Question 7

phonemes

Answer 7

• the perceptually distinct units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another (p, b, d, t)
• pat, bat, bad
• languages differ in the sounds they use as phonemes

Question 8

prosody development: foetus

Answer 8

the foetal auditory system is fully functioning during the last trimester

Question 9

Prosody development - newborns

Answer 9

newborns:
- prefer their own mother’s voice
- discriminate languages with different prosody but not languages of similar prosody
- prefer their native language compared to a foreign language
- cry with an “accent”

Question 10

Children’s babble

Answer 10

initially wide range of sounds. In first year move towards producing only sounds of target language

Question 11

Phoneme development: 1-2 months

Answer 11

at 1-2 months infants can discriminate between all sounds, even foreign ones. Adults only discriminate those in their language

Question 12

Phoneme development: 7-11 months

Answer 12

systemic decline in ability to distinguish sounds from non-target language and increase for target language
- study on English and Japanese learning infants

Kuhl et al, 2006

Question 13

At what age can infants segment words from their language? + study

Answer 13

they gain this ability at 7.5 months
- but not at 6 months

• done with a repetitive familiarisation phase: cup cup cup …
• then a test phase incorporating the word into sentences

Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995

Question 14

How do infants gain the ability to “find words”?

Answer 14

• track the co-occurrence of syllables
• syllables that co-occur often are likely part of the same word

Question 15

Study: finding the words
(Saffran et al., 1996)

Answer 15

• experiment with 8-month-olds using highly controlled made up language
• few minutes of listening to words in randomized order
• infants listen longer to ‘part-words’, suggesting they found the words in the stream

‘part words’ = fusions of the original set of words they listened to

Question 16

Infant directed speech - Christia, 2013

Answer 16

• higher pitched
• slower speaking rate
• important words are generally at the end and exaggerated more
• boundaries between phrases are enhanced, easier to segment speech
• infants prefer to listen to IDS and are more attentive to those who use it

proved: IDS > ADS, Theissen, Hill and Saffran

Question 17

“anchor” words for learning language

Answer 17

• highly frequent salient words (e.g., Mummy)
• highly frequent linguistic words (e.g., the, he)

if you can identify a word in the speech stream you can identify one boundary of the adjacent words

Question 18

finding the words: 6-month-olds

Answer 18

highly familiar words help 6-month-olds segment words
(Bortfeld et al., 2005)

recall that 6-month-olds fail in the Jusczyk & Aslin study (prompt - 7.5 months)

Question 19

segmenting words: 8-month-olds

Answer 19

• some linguistic categories of words are highly frequent
• infants can use “the” to segment nouns at 8 months
• at test, infants listened longer to an isolated word that was taught with a real function word
  (Shi & Lepage, 2008)

Question 20

syntax sensitivity: 8-month-olds

Answer 20

• In Japanese the syntax order is switched (relative to English)
• by 8-months infants are sensitive to this

Gervain et al., 2008

Question 21

frequent-first vs. frequent-final study

Answer 21

• Italian is a frequent-first
  language; Japanese is a frequent-final language (syntax)
• 8-month olds from each country listen longer to the corresponding type (frequent-first etc..)
• by 8 months, infants have started to learn some of the ordering rules for their language

Question 22

rule-learning: 6-month-olds

Answer 22

• 6-month olds could learn an abstract rule with linguistic stimuli
  (Marcus et al., 1999)