LD: The sounds of speech Flashcards
Nature / Nurture debate in language development
Nature: Logically, people must have some built-in knowledge in order to learn language; otherwise there are infinite possibilities
Nurture: People need to hear language in order to speak it
Does language learning and processing occur in a distinct, modular area of the brain?
Brain modularity:
Broca’s area;
Wernicke’s area
however, not necessary true:
Many non-linguistic things appear localized in the brain (e.g., expert piano players);
Many aspects of language (such as word and concept meaning) appear to be spread throughout the entire cerebral cortex
Broca’s area’s function in language learning and processing
Appears to have something to do with grammatical processing; and fluency;
Adjacent to the part of the motor control area for the jaws, lips, and tongue;
Damage to Broca’s area produces a certain kind of aphasia (language difficulty) resulting in stilted, ungrammatical (but contentful) speech
Wernicke’s area’s function in language learning and processing
Appears to have something to do with meaning and word access;
Adjacent to the primary auditory area that receives linguistic input;
Damage to Wernicke’s area produces a certain kind of aphasia resulting in fluent speech that is completely lacking in sense
Environmental factors in language development
Feral children with no language (But too many confounds)
Deaf children is a way to unconfound
Second language performance depends on the age it was learned.
Clear evidence for a “sensitive period” for language learning, but hard to tell with other forms of expert learning
What are phonemes?
Units of sound (consonants or vowels) in a language: the shortest segment of speech that distinguishes two words
Cross-linguistic distribution of Phonemes
Languages vary dramatically in total number of phonemes;
But there are commonalities and patterns governing which phonemes are most frequent
What does it mean to “learn” a phoneme?
Different phonemes (e.g., /g/ and /k/) like a continuum;
Actually it is more like categorical perception, even though the underlying physical stimulus is continuous (Consonants are perceived categorically, but vowels aren’t)
How does categorical perception of phoneme develop
Inborn;
Through experience with language
How to test categorical perception of phoneme
Test via habituation;
Infants get bored if presented with the same stimulus for long enough
Developmental Trajectory of phoneme perception
At birth can perceive consonant contrasts in all languages categorically;
By around 12 months of age they can only hear those that are in their native language, makes speech perception faster and more efficient
Statistical learning
Sensitivity to the statistics of the environment:
Which things occur;
How often they occur;
Which things they occur with
Two general kinds of Statistical Learning
Individual: how often and in what distribution does a thing occur;
Co-occurrence: how often and in what distribution do two different things occur together
Languages differ in the statistical distribution of their phonemes. Could this be driving learning?
8-month-old English-learning babies, trained on a Hindi contrast that doesn’t occur in English.
Groups:
Unimodal: Distribution favored one category; Bimodal: Distribution favored two categories
If they can learn the contrast based on distributional info, they should do so in the bimodal but not unimodal condition.
Infants dishabituate only in the bimodal condition, suggesting they used that distribution to learn the Hindi phoneme contrast
Good phoneme learning is associated with?
Good vocabulary learning
