phonology and word segmentations

Question 1

unit of sound

Answer 1

shortest segment of speech which distinguished two words

Question 2

vowels

Answer 2

sounds where air is not blocked but produced with a relative flow of air
main dimensions:
high vs low: depends on tongue position which affects how big the space in the mouth is.
front vs back: depends on lip posture and where in the mouth vowels are produced (advanced, neutral, retracted)

Question 3

consonants

Answer 3

defined by features that affect where the air is blocked and that interacts with the sound
the main features:
- voicing: voiced (z, v, g, b, d) and voiceless (s,f,k,p,t) phonemes by voice onset time- the time it takes for vocal cords to vibrate

place: where the obstruction is being made:

manner: how airflow passes through stops, fricative, approx

bliabial: front, alveolar: mid, palatal: bit back velar: very back

Question 4

phonemes

Answer 4

unit of sound in a language: shortest segment of speech that distinguishes two words

Question 5

phones

Answer 5

any distinct speech sound regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meaning- dont distinguish between different words

Question 6

allophones

Answer 6

set of phones that map onto a single phoneme in a particular language

Question 7

phoneme acquisition

Answer 7

many phonemes in one language do not occur in others. phonemes are perceived categorically. categorical perception is a general phenomenon where our perceptual system imposes a discrete category even through the underlying physical stimulus is Continuus.

Question 8

testing categorical perception

Answer 8

categorical perception for voicing, place and manner of articulation, show that from 3 months or less.
- infants do not discriminate all physically equal acoustic differences but show heightened sensitivity to those importnat for languages

Question 9

specialization toward native language

Answer 9

even though young infants can hear all phonetic contrasts, by 12 months they can hear only those that are in their native language

Question 10

unlearning

Answer 10

makes speech perception faster and more efficient

Question 11

phoneme learning= statisitcal learning

Answer 11

statistical learning: sensitivity to the statistics of the environment which things occur, how often they occur, and which things they occur with
two kinds:
- individual: how often and in what distribution does a thing occur
co-occurence: how often and in what distribution do two different things occur together.,

Question 12

evidence: phonemes and stat learning

Answer 12

phoneme training study: train infants on the distribution of a new language and see if they can learn the contrast
partip: 8 month babies learned Hindi=-
- infants dishabituate in the bimodal but not the unimodal condition. the distributional training does appear to help

Question 13

good phoneme learning —> vocab size

Answer 13

good phoneme learning at 6 months predicts later vocab size

Question 14

general conclusion of phoneme learning

Answer 14

distributional learning (which is a domain general capability, like general-purpose categorization) appears to be the key way that phonemes specific to a language are acquired

Question 15

Caveats

Answer 15

• phonemes are learned not only through distributional information about phones but also through prosody (stress and intonation), rhythm, emphasis
• children as old as 4 days can distinguish their parents language from a foreign language
• non-native contrasts aren’t lost but decline

Question 16

word segmentation

Answer 16

problem of word segmentation- spaces between words cant be heard.

Question 17

possible solutions- word segmentation

Answer 17

• carers tend to inset more pauses in child directed speech
• bootstrapping: once you’ve succesfully segmented few words, it becomes easier to find the remaining ones
• people use language specific phontactic constraints: restrictions on which sequences of sounds are permissible in that language
• langauge specific prosodic constraints: which stress patterns or pitch pattterns are common

Question 18

another transition: transitional probabilities

Answer 18

intutionL words are ‘chunks’ of language that always have the same sequence of language of phonemes
- this is captured by transitional probabilities: the probability that for each unit to follow another unit
- a type of statistical or distributional learning of how a unit occurs with another

Question 19

using transitional probabilities

Answer 19

• illusuion of TP in natural language
• can infants segment words in an artificial language simply on the basis of TP? infants can use TP, even if it is a hard test.
• tracking tps is not a language specific skill also seen in visual, action and spatial sequences.