Forming and Identifying Words Flashcards
Stress-Based Segmentation Strategy
English words more likely than not to begin with strong syllables
Grammatical words are mostly weak monosyllables
But not all languages have word final or word initial stress, and some are not stress based at all
Statistical properties of the speech stream
(useful for segmenting the speech stream)
Saffran Study
Some sounds occur together frequently while others do not
Saffran Study
Played an artificial speech stream until they learned it
Afterwards, kids listened longer to (novel) non-words
Not using an language-specific details to learn language – not specific language faculty needed
Kids are good at statistical reasoning (11 month old sensitivity sampling – pulling colored balls from a box)
Is this a complete solution, or is there something innate as to what is preferred as a word?
If kids are just statistically sampling words, where is the transition from low probability to high probability? (Too high would mean too many monosyllables)
Says nothing about internal representations
Studied initial consonant sound in the first 50 words produced by English speaking kids
The most common sounds used in babbling were the most common sounds in word
Whole words or syllables?
It is not clear that kids process words as a sequence of syllables
Words that are very similar in adult language are pronounced very differently in kids
Phonological Idioms
Children are very competent at producing certain words while being very bad at producing words that combine the same sounds
They often get worse at producing those words later as they start to process them as combinations of syllables
Reduplication
Easier to produce the same sound over and over again
Sesame Street becomes SiSi
The fis’ phenomenon
Child: This is my fis
Mother: This is your fis?
Child: No, my fis
Mother: This is your fish?
Child: Yes, my fis
The child seems to know how they adult should say the word, but don’t recognize their own error in producing it
Consonant Harmony
Use more similar consonants
Duck becomes guk
Tub becomes bub
Omission of Weak Syllables
Easier to produce
Banana becomes nana
Telephone becomes te’phone
Children’s Early Speech Errors
(5 types)
Phonological Idioms
Reduplication
The fis’ phenomenon
Consonant Harmony
Omission of Weak Syllables
