Week 4 - speech perception & production Flashcards
What month does reflexive vocalisation take place?
0-2 months - biological sounds - crying, burping
What month does cooing & laughter take place?
2-4 months (sustained laughter at 4 months / 16 weeks)
- coos when happy
What month does vocal play take place?
4-6 months
- squealing, growling and yelling
- ‘marginal babbling’ - cv like sounds increase
What month does canonical babbling take place?
(aka reduplicated)
- 6> months
- repeated speech syllables - cvcvcv structures e.g. bababa
What month does conversational babbling take place?
aka variegated babbling
- 10> months
- varied range of consonants
- different syllables structures kabaduba
- prosody
What is Prosody?
Intonation
When do first words appear?
10 - 18 months
12 months usually
18 months a bit later
When can infants discriminate phonetic contrasts in ALL languages?
0-4 months
When do infants have language specific perception?
6 - 9 months
When do infants fail to discriminate foreign language consonants?
10 months
Challenged of segmenting the speech stream?
- new words presented in sentences, not in isolation
- can be embedded in larger words such as can in cancer
- may require top-down processing
How is infant perception studied?
Brain Imaging - EEG/ ERP
- measured brain activity/waves
What does EEG / ERP stand for?
Electroencephalogram, Event Related Potential
What does HAS experiments stand for?
High Amplitude Sucking - sucking rate reflects infant’s interest - faster, more interested
What age for HAS experiments?
0-3 months
What is Habituation?
Eventual loss of response to a stimulus
What is Dishabituation?
Recovery to normal baseline response when receiving different stimulus
Why does HAS work?
Children can recognize even new slightly distinct sounds.
Other experiments to test infant perception?
Head turn preference procedure, preferential looking
What is the Head Turn Preference?
When the infant looks away from the stimulus for more than 2 seconds
What is Preferential Looking?
Two images with audio playing that matches one image - measure looking time with eye tracking machines
How do newborns show a preference for speech?
Rather listen to human speech than other sounds
How many weeks of gestation does auditory function become functional by?
24th week
What is the Language Discrimination test?
Infants can distinguish between languages as they sucked more at the change in language
What is Rhythm-based Discrimination?
Infants can distinguish between languages with different rhythmic patterns but not for languages of similar class e.g. Spanish and Portuguese
What hypothesis believes a new-born’s mind is a blank slate?
Nurture Hypothesis - believes infants must learn the necessary discriminations for their target language
(Skinner - Behaviourism)
What hypothesis believes a new-born is endowed with capacity to discriminate all of the contrasts of every language?
Nature - believes they ‘forget’ the ones in the target language? (Chomsky - universal grammar)
When can infants discriminate between native and non-native contrasts equally well?
At birth
At what age do infants become like adults, only being able to handle native contrasts?
12 months
What is Phonemic Organisation?
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
What is the advantage of phonemic organisation?
Restricts the number of possibilities of valuable phonemes and minimises chances of making errors
- develop a phonological system
What cues doe infants use to segment speech stream?
Prosodic cues, phonotactic cues, words in isolation, statistical cues
What are prosodic cues?
rhythm, stress, intonation of speech
What are phonotactic cues?
language specific syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences
- which sounds can co-occur and more likely to occur at the beg or end
What are statistical cues?
The likelihood of one syllable being followed by another
What stress pattern does English have?
Trochaic stress pattern - strong then weak e.g. DOctor
What age are infants sensitive to phonotactic cues?
9 months
What percent of words that children hear occur in isolation?
9%
What is Transitional Probabilities?
The likelihood of one syllable being followed by another - keeping track of this allows babies to guess where a word begins and ends (segment)
