phonology and word segmentations Flashcards
unit of sound
shortest segment of speech which distinguished two words
vowels
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)
consonants
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
phonemes
unit of sound in a language: shortest segment of speech that distinguishes two words
phones
any distinct speech sound regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meaning- dont distinguish between different words
allophones
set of phones that map onto a single phoneme in a particular language
phoneme acquisition
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.
testing categorical perception
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
specialization toward native language
even though young infants can hear all phonetic contrasts, by 12 months they can hear only those that are in their native language
unlearning
makes speech perception faster and more efficient
phoneme learning= statisitcal learning
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.,
evidence: phonemes and stat learning
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
good phoneme learning —> vocab size
good phoneme learning at 6 months predicts later vocab size
general conclusion of phoneme learning
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
Caveats
- 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
word segmentation
problem of word segmentation- spaces between words cant be heard.
possible solutions- word segmentation
- 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
another transition: transitional probabilities
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
using transitional probabilities
- 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.
