development of speech perception 2

Question 1

what do animal studies on perception show?

Answer 1

Kuhl and Miller 78- lots of animals are as good/better than humans; ability of cochlear rather than linguistic abilities (Eimas)

Question 2

Evidence against natavist account?

Answer 2

(eilers and minifie 75) 4-17week infnats with high amp sucking; sensitivty to native phonemic contrasts is not consistent

Question 3

at what age do infants show ‘neural commitment’?

Answer 3

Kuhl 06: at 6-12months, tested by head-turn, /r/ and /l/ contrast distinguished

Question 4

How does neural commitment develop with age

Answer 4

most attuned at 24m; perception moves from language general to lanuguage specific, neural commitment is correlated with later development; kuhl: not a ‘critical period’

Question 5

what is statistical learning?

Answer 5

sound is attended to before meaning, frequency of patterns and phonemes (legal/illegal combinations) are noted.

Question 6

Saffran 08

Answer 6

exposed babies to 3 minutes of artificial language and tested them using head turn reference procedure– able to learn speEch stream

Question 7

Native Language Magnet Model (kuhl)

Answer 7

Frequently heard sounds warp perception, particular distributions of sounds change innate neural auditory systems. IDS help intellibility by stretching vowel space to make distinct vowels- (higher, more variable pitch and slower speech rate)

Question 8

Evidence for IDS being helpful?

Answer 8

Liu and Kuhl 03: Mothers with clearer speech have babies with better speech perception performance
Kuhl 07: English infants exposed to chinese by 1) TV/audio or 2) live interaction. (2) better, key factor of language learning

Question 9

Explain discrimination and identification

Answer 9

discrimination: ability to hear differences between two sounds (auditory level)
identification: ability to consistently assign a label to sound (linguistic level)

Question 10

Hazan and Barret 00

Answer 10

Adults are very able to cope with and categorise across and within speaker variability, acquired into adolescence

Question 11

Lee 99- production

Answer 11

within-subject variability in temporal and spectral parameters is greater than adults up to 14 years

Question 12

Johnson 00- perception

Answer 12

low intelligibility/comprehension of degraded speech (by noise and reverberation) until 14 years

Question 13

What are the rl implications of childrens’ acoustic develoment

Answer 13

poorer perception of speech in noise