Lecture 2 - Phonological Development Flashcards
Why is language acquisition considered difficult for infants?
- Infants face challenges like the segmentation problem (speech is continuous)
- Lack of invariable (different auditory signals for the same round)
- Speaker variability (each speaker sounds different)
What is phonology?
Phonology is the study of how sounds are used within a language
What is phonetics?
Phonetics is the study of raw sounds, focusing on their production and physical properties
What is semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning in language
What is syntax?
Syntax is the study of word order and sentence structure in a language
What is morphology?
Morphology is the study of words and how they are formed
What is inflectional morphology?
Inflectional morphology concerns changes to a word that do not alter its underlying meaning
What is derivational morphology?
Derivational morphology involves changes to a word that alter its underlying meaning
What is speech?
Speech is a type of sound, characterised by waves of increases and decreases in air pressure, composed of various frequencies and energies
What is a spectrogram?
A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal a it varies with time
How do adult listeners perceive speech despite its variability?
Adult listeners perceive speech as composed of discrete phonemes, despite continuous and variable sound, using phoneme identification tasks to demonstrate this perception
What is Voice Onset Time (VOT)? Example?
- VOT is the time delay between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal fold vibration
- For example, a long VOT corresponds to the /k/ sound, while a short VOT corresponds to /g/
What is phoneme restoration? Example?
- Phoneme restoration refers to the phenomenon where listeners perceive missing phonemes based on context
- For example in the sentence “The eel was on the axle”, listeners might perceive the word as wheel, meal, reel, or peel
How do infants learn phonemes? How has this been demonstrated?
- Infants learn phonemes through exposure to speech
- Demonstrated by experiments like High Amplitude Sucking and Prenatal language perception, where they show sensitivity to language measuring sucking rate in response to sound change
What did the Mehler et al. (1988) study about newborn language discrimination?
Newborns can discriminate between languages (e.g., French and Russian) and show innate language preference, even in utero
What is perceptual narrowing in language development?
Perception narrowing refers to an infant’s decreasing ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts as they become more attuned to the sounds of their native language around 9 months
What is the High Amplitude Sucking method?
The High Amplitude Sucking method is used to study infant language discrimination by measuring sucking rate in response to sound changes
What is neural plasticity in language development
Plasticity is the brains ability to shape neural circuits through interaction with the environment, especially in early development, allowing for language learning
What are critical and sensitive periods in language development>
Critical and sensitive periods refer to the windows of time during which the brain is particularly receptive to language input, with certain periods being more important for learning specific language skills
What is neural commitment in language development?
Neural commitment refers to the brain;s specialisation for processing native language sounds, which occurs early in life as a result of exposure to language
What is the segmentation problem in speech perception?
The segmentation problem in speech problem reefers to the challenge in identifying word boundaries in continuous speech
How does phoneme identification help adults make sense of speech?
Phoneme identification allows adults to recognise discrete sounds in speech, despite the variability in how those sounds are produced
What did Werker and Lalonde (1988) find in their study on phonetic discrimination?
They found that infants (7 months) can discriminate phonetic contrasts that adults (e.g., English speakers) cannot, such as retroflex vs alveolar sounds in Hindi
What did Kuhl et al. (2006) find about infants’ ability to discrinimate phonetic contrasts?
Infants aged 6-8 months show high accuracy in discriminating non-native phonetic contrasts, which decreases by 10-12 months
What is the significance of the Thompson and Nelson (2001) study?
This study outlines key stages in brain development, such as neurulation, cell migration, and synaptogenesis, all of which support language acquisition and cognitive functions
