Lecture 2 - Language Acquisition 1

Question 1

(lecture):

Why should language acquisition be hard?

Answer 1

(lecture):

See slide 5

Question 2

(lecture):

Read slide 6-9

Answer 2

(lecture):

Question 3

(lecture):

Read slide 10-11

Answer 3

(lecture):

The dark colours show lots of energy at a particular sound frequency at a particular point in time.

• Shows that speech is continuous, sounds and words blend smoothly into each other.

Question 4

(lecture):

Describe phonemes.

Answer 4

(lecture):

See slide 12

Question 5

(lecture):

What makes the sound ‘g’ and ‘k’ sound different to one another?

Answer 5

(lecture):

The voice onset time (VOT) is different.
The VOT is the length of time it takes for the vocal cords to start vibrating after the initial release of air.

See slide 13

Question 6

(lecture):

Is phoneme identification continuous or categorical?

Answer 6

(lecture):

Categorical

See slide 14-15

Question 7

(lecture):

Describe the phoneme restoration effect.

Answer 7

(lecture):

See slide 17

People perceived the words depending on the context in which the word was presented.

Question 8

(lecture):

How can we investigate babies identifying a visual or autarky stimulus

Answer 8

(lecture):

High amplitude sucking

When the stimulus is new, their sucking is harder and faster. When the stimulus is repeated, the infants become habituated to it and no longer find it so interesting and rate of sucking drops off.

See slide 19

Question 9

(lecture):

Read slide 20

Answer 9

(lecture):

Infants noticed a change between their mother’s language and another. But did not notice a change between other languages.

Question 10

(lecture):

Read slide 21

Answer 10

(lecture):

It was hypothesised that if infants learned language prenatally, then they would already have knowledge about language straight after birth. An experiment confirmed this, watch the lecture again to see who. (around 20 mins)

Question 11

(lecture):

What are the differences in phoneme perception between Korean-speaking adults and Korean newborns?

Answer 11

(lecture):

Newborns are sensitive to all speech contrasts in any language. The ability to distinguish between these contrasts is innate and gradually lose this ability.

See slide 22

Question 12

(lecture):

Describe the conditioned head turn technique.

Answer 12

(lecture):

See slide 24-25

Question 13

(lecture):

Define phonemes and morphemes.

Answer 13

(lecture):

See slide 26

Question 14

(lecture):

Define morphology.

Answer 14

(lecture):

See slide 27

Question 15

(lecture):

Describe regular and irregular words.

Answer 15

(lecture):

See slide 28-29

Question 16

(lecture):

What are two ways in which children learn morphology?

Answer 16

(lecture):

See slide 30-34

Question 17

(lecture):

Describe the WUG test.

Answer 17

(lecture):

See slide 35-36

Question 18

(lecture):

SUMMARY

• Speech perception is hard because of
– Lack of segmentation
– Lack of invariance
– Speaker variability
• Infants gradually tune in to the speech
sounds of the language(s) being spoken
around them
• Children gradually learn the implicit rules
that govern morphology, and can apply
them productively.

Answer 18

(lecture):

Question 19

(reading):

Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology.
Word,14(2-3), 150-177.

Answer 19

(Reading):