Lecture 16 - Language: Phonology and Word Segmentation Flashcards
What is a phoneme?
What are vowels?
What are consonants?
What are the two dimensions that make up how we speak different vowels?
Where along the tongue the sound in made and how the lips are shaped to make the sound.
What are the three different ways in which air flows in the articulation of consonants?
- Stops.
- Fricative.
- Approximant
Different languages have different numbers of phonemes.
True or false?
True.
Are vowels and consonants phonemes?
Yes.
What is the difference between phonemes and phones?
Are both consonants and vowels perceived categorically?
No. Only consonants are perceived categorically.
What is the habituation paradigm and how is it used to examine when infants/children learn to distinguish between phonemes of a language?
Already at 3 months of age infants can distinguish between similar phonemes.
True or false.
True.
Is it true that infants can perceive all consonants across all languages even though adults cannot?
Yes.
Is the ability of categorical perception of phonemes in infants evidence for innate knowledge. i.e are infants born with the capacity to make these distinctions?
Yes, most likely. This is also found in other animals, so does not provide evidence for the language-specific argument that sees humans as having an innate ability for language acquisition and use.
At what age do infants lose their ability to recognise/perceive phonemes in other languages?
What is one proposed benefit of this “unlearning”?
Around 12 months, but starts at around 8 months.
It has been proposed that this unlearning may make the child more efficient and faster at speech perception.
What is statistical learning and what is an example of statistical learning when in comes in language development in infants/children?
Statistical learning is when we learn from what is happening in our environment and with what frequency these things are happening.
An example of this is losing the ability to perceive phonemes of all languages, instead only retaining the ability to perceived phonemes of your own language.
