Language Part 2

Question 1

Explain phonemes, phones, vowels and consonants

Answer 1

Phonemes
> the shortest unit in the particular language that segregates two words (sing vs sink, play vs clay)

Phones
> shortest unit in language that does not have to segregate words

Vowels
> unit of sounds that allow air to leave the mouth freely
1. High vs low (location of the tongue)
2. Inner vs outer (the location where the voice to expresses)

Consonants
> unit of sounds that obstructs the air flow from the mouth
1. voicing
> voice onset time (VOT): the time between the vibration of the voice cords and the sound actually projected
2. place of tongue
3. manner

Question 2

consonants are perceived _____ but vowels are _______

Answer 2

categorically, not categorically

Question 3

Explain categorical habituation in phonemes

Answer 3

Experiment done on 3-month infant, sucking habituation
Show excitation to phonemes in a different VOT category, comparing to other phonemes that are in the same phoneme category.

Question 4

When do infants start to lose sensitivity to all phonemes and show familiarity to their own native language and through what mechanism

Answer 4

starts from 8 month and complete by around 12 months. Unlearning, which is the tendency of infants losing the ability to identify universal phonemes, but speed up learning native language

Question 5

Explain the distributional learning experiment (Hindi vs English)

Answer 5

Done on 8-month infant
Exposed to bimodal (twice) and unimodal (once)learning curve
Shows that infants under the bimodal curve = distinguishes Hindi better =more exposure
Longer time to dishabituate

Question 6

Explain the relationship between phoneme learning and vocab size

Answer 6

Better phoneme learning at 6-month = large vocab size

Question 7

Possible word segmentation solutions

Answer 7

CDS
> the use of CDS facilitates the segmentation of words
Bootstrapping
> If a person identifies a few words in the sentence, he will also be able to identify the rest
Phonotactic constraints
> Some patterns of the word just barely exist (e.g., alick vs slick)
Prosodic constraints
> English words usually have a heavy syllable in the first part of the word (water, jacket)

Question 8

Explain transitional probabilities and the experiment

Answer 8

Humans identify words in a sentence by observing the probability of the unit following another unit
A kind of distributional learning
Infants at 8-month old show habituation to words, comparing to part-words (show that they are familiar with words than part-words)

Question 9

Evidence that supports transitional probability

Answer 9

> Shown in less artificial languages (i.e., Italian)
Shown in larger vocab size
Shown in large language models (i.e., Chat GPT)

Question 10

What are the other areas that show transitional probablilites

Answer 10

visual
action
spatial