Speech Perception And Production

Question 1

Why isn’t identifying words in natural speech easy

Answer 1

-only small proportion of parents speech to children consists of single word utterances
-there are no consistent silences between words
-silent gaps dont always indicate interruptions in speech
-new words are often presented in sentences not in isolation

Question 2

What are the different properties of language that can differ

Answer 2

Speech sounds
Rhythm
Sound sequences
Syllable structure

Question 3

What are the 5 ways we study infant perception

Answer 3

-preferential looking
-head turn preference procedure
-electroencephalogram
-habituation dishabituation method
-high amplitude sucking paradigm

Question 4

What does a electroencephalogram (eeg) do

Answer 4

-measures the electrical activity in the brain via electrodes placed on the scalp
-excellent temporal resolution
-studies over the life span
-sensitive to moment
-noiseless

Question 5

What is the habituation dishabituation method

Answer 5

Habituate infant on one stimulus and show and new different stimulus
Does the infant react to the new stimulus?

Question 6

High amplitude sucking paradigm

Answer 6

Does the infant start sucking faster on the summit with the new simuli?
-length of time looking at stimulus
-sucking rate drops when infant is bored and sucking rate picks up if infant is interested
-babies are made apart by changes in the environment
-up to 3 months old

Question 7

Head turning preference procedure

Answer 7

-older infants
-requires head turning ability
-sounds are played from two speakers mounted at eye level to the left and right of the infant
-the sounds start when the infant looks towards the blinking side light and ends when the infant looks away for more than ten seconds
-measure how long they look

Question 8

Preferential looking

Answer 8

-side by side images or movies
-audio played that matches one of the stimuli
-measure looking time
-eye tracking

Question 9

What is the rhythm based discrimination hypothesis

Answer 9

• infants extract and build representation of languages based on rhythmic properties which are known to vary across languages
  -infants can discriminate between languages with different rhythmic patterns
  -the rhythmic information infants rely on are class specific not language specific
  -at 4 days old infants can discriminate their native language from a foreign one
  -discrimaintion is based on rhythmic properties

Question 10

What is a phonemic organisation

Answer 10

-loss of perceptual ability is related to development of phonemic categories for the first language
-it enables children to only attend to those sounds that have a phonemic value in their language to permit them to distinguish meaning
-it assists children in the task of mapping sound meaning learning words

Question 11

What cues do infants use when segmenting speech

Answer 11

Prosodic cues, phonotactic cues, words in isolation and statistical cues

Question 12

What are Prosodic cues

Answer 12

-relate to rhythm, stress pattern and intonation of speech
-many languages have distinctive rhythms and stress patterns
-English learning infants are sensitive to strong weak stress patterns and can use these to segment words out of the speech stream
-Trochaic pattern eg DOCtor HEADache

Question 13

What are isolated words

Answer 13

9% of words children hear occur in isolation
Isolation of words are often the ones infants learn first eg mummy

Question 14

What are phonotactic regularities

Answer 14

-to learn word boundaries
-restrictions on what sounds can occur
-no English words begin with kn or vzg
-some sounds are more likely to occur at begging or end br/nt
-infants are sensitive to these from as young as 9 months

Question 15

What is statistical learning

Answer 15

-transistionsl probabilités refer to the likelihood or one syllable being followed by another
-syllable strings with high TP likely to be words, those with low TP unlikely to be words
-exposed to an unsegmented speech stream of artificial language with higher TP’s within words= better recognition of words over part words

Question 16

What do clever statisticians do?

Answer 16

-keep track of the probability with which sounds co occur
-use probabilities to make guesses about where words begin and end
Eg pre-ty has a higher probability than ty-bab

Question 17

Speech production at 0-2 months

Answer 17

-reflexive vocalisation
-crying and vegetative sounds (sneezes, burp, grunts)
- infants vocalisation are not exclusively reflexive and may contain patterns of their native language

Question 18

Speech production at 2-4 months

Answer 18

-cooing and laughter
-first comfort sounds
-frequency of vegetative sounds and crying declines

Question 19

Speech production at 4-6 months

Answer 19

-vocal play
-increasing control over the production of their growing repertoires of sounds
-this leads to squeals, growls, yells
-marginal babbling starts and then consonant and vowel like sounds increase

Question 20

Speech production at 6 months >

Answer 20

-reduplicated/ canonical babbling cv
-infants starts to produce stings of repeated speech syllables (with the same vowel of consonant combinations)
-eg dadadadadad or gogogogo

Question 21

Speech production at 10 months >

Answer 21

-conversational/ variegated babble
-the range of consonants and vowels produced expands further
-not as repetitive but a combination of different syllables in servies eg ka-du-bu-ba
-prosody (the intonation contour of speech) becomes noticeable at this stage

Question 22

Is babbling all the same?

Answer 22

• babies babbling is influenced by the language they hear
  -in the first 6 months vowel articulations predominate
  -most consonantal sounds are produced in the back of the mouth
  -with the onset of babbling there is a marked shift toward front consonants