Week 4 - speech perception & production

Question 1

What month does reflexive vocalisation take place?

Answer 1

0-2 months - biological sounds - crying, burping

Question 2

What month does cooing & laughter take place?

Answer 2

2-4 months (sustained laughter at 4 months / 16 weeks)
- coos when happy

Question 3

What month does vocal play take place?

Answer 3

4-6 months
- squealing, growling and yelling
- ‘marginal babbling’ - cv like sounds increase

Question 4

What month does canonical babbling take place?

Answer 4

(aka reduplicated)
- 6> months
- repeated speech syllables - cvcvcv structures e.g. bababa

Question 5

What month does conversational babbling take place?

Answer 5

aka variegated babbling
- 10> months
- varied range of consonants
- different syllables structures kabaduba
- prosody

Question 6

What is Prosody?

Answer 6

Intonation

Question 7

When do first words appear?

Answer 7

10 - 18 months
12 months usually
18 months a bit later

Question 8

When can infants discriminate phonetic contrasts in ALL languages?

Answer 8

0-4 months

Question 9

When do infants have language specific perception?

Answer 9

6 - 9 months

Question 10

When do infants fail to discriminate foreign language consonants?

Answer 10

10 months

Question 11

Challenged of segmenting the speech stream?

Answer 11

• new words presented in sentences, not in isolation
• can be embedded in larger words such as can in cancer
• may require top-down processing

Question 12

How is infant perception studied?

Answer 12

Brain Imaging - EEG/ ERP
- measured brain activity/waves

Question 13

What does EEG / ERP stand for?

Answer 13

Electroencephalogram, Event Related Potential

Question 14

What does HAS experiments stand for?

Answer 14

High Amplitude Sucking - sucking rate reflects infant’s interest - faster, more interested

Question 15

What age for HAS experiments?

Answer 15

0-3 months

Question 16

What is Habituation?

Answer 16

Eventual loss of response to a stimulus

Question 17

What is Dishabituation?

Answer 17

Recovery to normal baseline response when receiving different stimulus

Question 18

Why does HAS work?

Answer 18

Children can recognize even new slightly distinct sounds.

Question 19

Other experiments to test infant perception?

Answer 19

Head turn preference procedure, preferential looking

Question 20

What is the Head Turn Preference?

Answer 20

When the infant looks away from the stimulus for more than 2 seconds

Question 21

What is Preferential Looking?

Answer 21

Two images with audio playing that matches one image - measure looking time with eye tracking machines

Question 22

How do newborns show a preference for speech?

Answer 22

Rather listen to human speech than other sounds

Question 23

How many weeks of gestation does auditory function become functional by?

Answer 23

24th week

Question 24

What is the Language Discrimination test?

Answer 24

Infants can distinguish between languages as they sucked more at the change in language

Question 25

What is Rhythm-based Discrimination?

Answer 25

Infants can distinguish between languages with different rhythmic patterns but not for languages of similar class e.g. Spanish and Portuguese

Question 26

What hypothesis believes a new-born’s mind is a blank slate?

Answer 26

Nurture Hypothesis - believes infants must learn the necessary discriminations for their target language
(Skinner - Behaviourism)

Question 27

What hypothesis believes a new-born is endowed with capacity to discriminate all of the contrasts of every language?

Answer 27

Nature - believes they ‘forget’ the ones in the target language? (Chomsky - universal grammar)

Question 28

When can infants discriminate between native and non-native contrasts equally well?

Answer 28

At birth

Question 29

At what age do infants become like adults, only being able to handle native contrasts?

Answer 29

12 months

Question 30

What is Phonemic Organisation?

Answer 30

Loss of perceptual ability is related to development of phonemic categories for the first language
- so only attend to sounds that have phonemic value in their language

Question 31

What is the advantage of phonemic organisation?

Answer 31

Restricts the number of possibilities of valuable phonemes and minimises chances of making errors
- develop a phonological system

Question 32

What cues doe infants use to segment speech stream?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

What are prosodic cues?

Answer 33

rhythm, stress, intonation of speech

Question 34

What are phonotactic cues?

Answer 34

language specific syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences
- which sounds can co-occur and more likely to occur at the beg or end

Question 35

What are statistical cues?

Answer 35

The likelihood of one syllable being followed by another

Question 36

What stress pattern does English have?

Answer 36

Trochaic stress pattern - strong then weak e.g. DOctor

Question 37

What age are infants sensitive to phonotactic cues?

Answer 37

9 months

Question 38

What percent of words that children hear occur in isolation?

Answer 38

9%

Question 39

What is Transitional Probabilities?

Answer 39

The likelihood of one syllable being followed by another - keeping track of this allows babies to guess where a word begins and ends (segment)