Lecture 1 Flashcards
Prelinguistic Speech Processing
Language
- generative
- comprised of small units combined (phonology)
- conveys meaning (semantics)
- social
syntax
- rules on how words go together (order means different things)
Preference study
- with no training, what do infants want to listen (or look) to
habituation/familiarization study
first, we train infants and then measure what they prefer
change detection studies
train infants to respond to a change (can infants tell the difference between two things)
prosody
- pattern of stress and intonation in language
- languages have different prosodic patterns
phonemes
- perceptually distinct units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another
- languages have different sounds for phonemes
early phonological development: prosody (5)
- foetal auditory system is fully functioning in last trimester
newborns:
- prefer mothers voice
- discriminate languages with different prosody (german/spanish) but not languages of similar prososdy (english/dutch)
- prefer native laguage to foreign language
- cry with an ‘accent’
how many phonemes in each language
~40
children’s babble
- initially wide range of sounds
- towards end of first year move towards producing only sounds of target language
early phonological development: phonemes
- 1-2 months discriminate between sounds,even foreign ones. Adult on in their language
- 7-11 months, systematic decline in distinguishing sounds from non-target language, increase for target language
statistics: infants finding words
- track co-occurrence of syllables
- syllables that co-occur are likely part of the same word ~8 months
- in experiment infants listen to longer part-words, found words in the steam using statistics
infants finding words
~7.5 months can segment words from their language
- react differently to words they know
Infant Directed Speeh: (prosody)
- higher pitched
- slower speaking rate
- exaggerated prosodic pattern
- boundaries between phrases are enhanced, making it easier to segment speech
IDS vs ADS
- infants segment speech better with IDS than ADS and prefer to listen to IDS
frequency can help infants find words
- salient words e.g. child’s name
- linguistic words e.g. he/she
- ‘anchor’ to differentiate known word and adjacent word
familiar words: Bortfeld et al. 2005
- highly familiar words help 6-month-old segment words
- e.g. pairing with names helps anchor segmentation
linguistic categories and infants
- some linguistic categories are highly frequent
- infants can use ‘the’ to segment nouns ~8 months
frequency in infants
- different languages have different frequency order
e.g. italian is frequent first, japanense is frequent-final - infants prefer to listen to the frequency order rules for their language
note
infants tune to specifics of their language (sounds,order) before they begin to speak
