Week 3 Flashcards
A child’s linguistic abilities per month
- Womb: child’s hearing system is in place in the womb and can distinguish mother’s voice from others.
- Third trimester: child can hear certain properties of speech coming from outside of womb (rhythm and intonation).
- Birth: the brain already has acoustic memories.
- *Three y/olds can discriminate two languages if they belong to different rhythmic classes.
- Six-eight weeks: can discriminate changes in pitch contour.
- Two-four months: cooing and laughter.
- Four-seven months: the vocal play stage; better, pitch changes (squeals, changes in loudness, yells), fricative sounds, bilabial and uvular thrills.
Reflexive vocalisation
An infant (0-2 months) can produce grunts, sighs and crying. These are not really speech sounds, but are related to speech development. Infants can also produce resonant consonants (with a closed mouth, like a syllabic nasal).
Lateral alveolar click
Transcribed: [||]. A sound made by infants in which the closure is made between the side of the tongue and gums. We use these sounds when riding horses.
The second six months of an infant and its linguistic abilities
- Seven-Ten months: the babbling phase of vocal production is not controlled by the brain but rather based on jaw movement. It’s called canonical babbling where repetitions of the same CV sequence are produced.
- Ten-Twelve months: second stage is called variegated babbling; the babbled syllables may vary.
Canonical babbling
A phase (7-10 months) where the child produces repetitions of the same CV sequence. It consists of a stop and an open vowel.
[dæ dæ]
Variegated babbling
This is the second stage of babbling, where the babbled syllables may vary.
[bɐ dæ]
What are the child’s babbling like?
The babbling during the first year of life is mostly vowel-like (vocalic).
The triangular three point vowel system
This system emerges between roughly 24 and 41 weeks.
[i] [u]
[a]
Why does the child produce these three vowels (triangular three point vowel system)?
[i] [u] and [a] require less fine-grained motor control from the brain.
‘Learning by forgetting’ phenomenon
Sub-phonemic differences in specific languages begin to be ignored by infants during the first year of life.
Hindi/Thai -> aspiration is phonemic.
English -> aspiration is not phonemic.
How can the child start identifying words in an utterance when it doesn’t have a mental lexicon yet?
One-word utterances by adults may help. Segmentation of the stream of speech allows the child to have a mental lexicon.
How can the child’s first words deviate from the adult forms?
- Methathesis: [pʌk] for ‘cup’.
- Consonant harmony: [gʌk] for ‘duck’.
- Elision: infants elide unstressed syllables [‘nana] for ‘banana’.
- Reduction of consonant clusters in onsets/codas: [neik] for ‘snake’.
- Reduplication of syllables: ‘gaga for ‘Edgar’.
Metathesis
[pʌk] for ‘cup’
Consonant Harmony
The place of articulation (sometimes manner) of two or more consonants are harmonised; they are articulated at the same place of articulation.
It takes place in CVC syllables where two consonants are different. One of the them triggers the other to assume its place of articulation. This results in a CVC syllable in which the two consonants are now the same; having harmonised.
[gʌk] for ‘duck’ where the place of articulation. The word-initial consonant is produced in the same place as the final consonant.
Here you should specify the direction of harmony; whether it is regressive CH or progressive.
LAB, COR, DOR
LAB = bilabials and labio-dentals (lips).
COR = dentals, alveolars, post-alveolars and palatals (produced with front of the tongue).
DOR = velars and uvulars (produced with back of tongue).
