Lecture 6

Question 1

Voice onset time (VOT)

Answer 1

duration of how long the vocal cords keep vibrating: difference between the sounds: “ba” and “pa”

ex: I saw a back (voiced) vs. I saw a pack (voiceless)

Question 2

“Voiced” word example

Answer 2

back

back has almost no break in vocal fold vibration,

Question 3

“Voiceless” word example

Answer 3

pack has a slight break in it where the vocal folds stop vibrating

Question 4

Children born with voice onset time boundaries?

Answer 4

maybe

Lisker and Abramson

Question 5

Lisker and Abramson Study

Answer 5

recored a bunch of different languages

and counted all the ba and pa, gah and kah, dah and tah pairs

counted the VOT values

found out: that there are two categories of voiced and voiceless

Question 6

English speakers and VOT

Answer 6

can distinguish synthesized b/p sounds differing only in VOT, if tested using 20 and 40 msec

it’s much more difficult to distinguish sounds if they’re in the same category

Question 7

Ganong Effect

Answer 7

if you have an ambiguous sound and it can be interpreted either way (tah and dah)

you’re more likely to use top down processing to “hear” the consonant

type vs. dype

Question 8

Categorical Perception

Answer 8

listeners are much better at discriminating between categories than within categories

Question 9

How do infants perceive speech sounds?

Answer 9

every time the infants make a drag on their pacifier the experimenters introduce a speech sound

after habituation (when they’re bored because they’re used to it) when their is a change is category they are more interested = they are better at distinguishing those sounds = maybe infants are pre-programmed to recognize sounds at this point

Question 10

Under ideal conditions, young infants can tell apart

Answer 10

ANY TWO SPEECH SOUNDS that are used in any language for conveying different meanings

Question 11

language-specific refinement

experimental example?

Answer 11

around 10-12 months infants start losing the ability to distinguish speech sound contrasts that don’t exist in their native language (or maybe lose the ability to care)

Canadian babies discriminating Hindi speech sounds: discrimination at 6 months –> almost no discrimination at 10 months

Question 12

language specific refinement: vowels

Answer 12

by 6 months they seemed to have lost the discriminatory ability of non-native vowels

so this seems to happen more quickly that consonant sounds

Question 13

language specific refinement: vowels - bilinguals

Catalan and Spanish

Answer 13

U-shaped data

4.5 month olds discriminate

Catalan 8 month olds discriminate

Spanish 8 month olds don’t and bilinguals don’t

12 months bilinguals discriminate again (learn that those pronunciations matter?)

Question 14

Very likely that children can perceive contrasts before…

Answer 14

…they can produce them

Question 15

production follows perception

Answer 15

perceptually, kids can distinguish all sorts of sounds early on

gradually they narrow down to their own language

they’re doing perceptual sorting out and word learning at the same time (maybe knowing lots of words helps you narrow down the sounds in your language)

Question 16

production of language specific sounds

Answer 16

takes much longer to happen developmentally: babbling: need lots of practice, even if they roughly know what the sounds are supposed to be

because you need motor practice to get motor control

Question 17

Sound boundaries

Answer 17

some you’re born with

others are more language-variable and may require more learning (distinguishing all sounds may not be good because you could never recognize repeated instances of things - relearn words every time you meet a new person)

knowing individual sounds isn’t the same as knowing which ones go together in words

learning words as labels for things may make perception harder

Question 18

knowing individual sounds isn’t the same as

Answer 18

knowing which ones go together in words

Question 19

Boundaries you’re born with or learn very fast

Answer 19

VOT distinction

Question 20

Learning category boundaries

Answer 20

infants learn categories by keeping track of sound distributions

Question 21

keeping track of sound distributions

experiment Maye, Werker, Gerken

Answer 21

made up sound categories that don’t exist in english

Question 22

Fricatives

Answer 22

s, sh, f, th, z, v, dth,

show distributions as well

Question 23

Learning which sounds go together

dependent measure?

Answer 23

Headturn Preference Procedure: what does the infant thing seems interesting: does the infant listen more to one sound or another?

dependent measure: listening time to a given kind of auditory material

Question 24

Cues to Word Boundaries

Answer 24

stress: English most nouns are stress-initial (stress on the first syllable): can infer word boundaries based on where the stress lies (at the beginning of the word, which works pretty well)

Strong-initial (BUTler) vs. Weak-initial (reCLINE)
- word stress as a way kids are learning the words in their language (but this only really works for english)