Speech processing Flashcards
What changes precede the development of speech?
Shift from dyadic (mother-child) to triadic interaction - infant interacts with another person about their mutual experiences
Results into = Joint attention - paying attention to an object or entity and knowing that object is in the other person’s mind (around 9mo).
What can 9 months old understand about the other and speech (will)
distinguish if someone is unable or unwilling to share simple categories (animals, vehicles - using generalized imitation)
How do infants extract relevant sounds from speech (phonology)?
Contrasting pairs of speech sounds differ on one acoustic dimension - voice onset time
VOT - the boundary between ‘b’ and ‘p’ lies between 20 - 40 msc
These differences within accoustic dimension are perceived categorically
Categorical perception is not exclusive to sound. (also colour etc.)
PERCEPTUAL TUNING Within the 1st year, infants get attuned to the contrast (category boundaries) of their ambient language and lose sensitivity for foreign/non-native contrasts.
Japanese infants lose the ability to distinguish /l/ from /r/ between 6 and 12 months.
What is the relationship between sensitivity to native contrasts and language development?
Sensitivity to native contrasts between 6 and 12 months of age predicts future language development:
The more sensitive infants are to native sounds the larger their vocabularies at 2-3 years of age.
The more sensitive infants are to non-native sounds the smaller their vocabularies at 2-3 years of age.
Learning of speech sounds depends on social interaction - faces
When are infants able to reduplicate babbling?
around 6 months old
What is ‘babbling drift’ and why it occurs?
Babbling drift: Babbling increasingly tends to resemble characteristics of the ambient language
This is based on infant imitation abilities.
It engages a perception-action-loop that helps infants to learn about the acoustic consequences of their articulatory movements.
It is helped by social shaping – reinforcements of speech-like sounds by caregivers
How do we explain problem of word segmentation?
There are statistical cues to word segmentation
What is responsible for sudden increase in vocabulary size (vocabulary spurt)?
Happens around 12-13 moths.
How do infants learn to relate sounds to meanings? (semantics)
As children learn words and the concepts behind them, they learn more about what governs the labelling of different referents.
How do infants learn to modify and combine words (morphosyntax)?
Item-based learning: Children expand their language use by ‘cutting’ pieces of language and ‘pasting’ them into slots. (slot-filler construction)
Discovering schemas:
Children discover that groups of words exhibit similar patterns of usage (e.g. transitive schema).
What do recent theories believe about language acquisition?
to acquiring a skill rather than acquiring abstract knowledge
Explain term transitional probabilities
transitional probabilities is one of the statistical cues for word segmentation: the likelihood that one syllable follows the other
7-month-old infants can recognise syllable sequences with high transitional probabilities.
pretty baby, pretty dress, pretty doll…
p(ty | pre) = high; p(ba | ty) = low
using a predominant pattern as the cue is a form of word segmentation called :
metrical segmentation
What does transitional probability determine?
the likelihood that one syllable follows the other
7-month-old infants can recognise syllable sequences with high transitional probabilities.
pretty baby, pretty dress, pretty doll…
p(ty | pre) = high; p(ba | ty) = low
What serves as evidence for statistical learning?
Long-distance dependencies
Gomez et al. - the more different intervening words, the easier is to learn the long-distance dependencies (the pattern)
One little mouse is/runs…
Three little mice are/run
