Chapter 5 book Flashcards
(90 cards)
Infants’ speech perception ability
heir ability to devote attention to the prosodic and phonetic regularities of speech—develops tremendously in the first year as infants move from detecting larger patterns, such as rhythm, to detecting smaller patterns, such as combinations of specific sounds.
prosodic characteristics of speech
include the frequency, or pitch, of he duration, or length, of sounds; and the intensity, or loudness, of sounds.
- Combinations of these prosodic characteristics produce distinguishable stress and intonation patterns that infants can detect.
Stress
prominence placed on certain syllables of multisyllabic words.
Intonation
the prominence placed on certain syllables, but it also applies to entire phrases and sentences. F
By age 9 months, infants learning English prefer to listen to words
containing strong–weak stress patterns
How do infants use prosodic regularities to segment the speech stream?
- One way is by becoming familiar with the dominant stress patterns of their native lan-guage.
- Coupled with their ability to engage in statistical learn-ing, infants who notice the common stress patterns in their native language learn over time where likely word boundaries occur in running speech.
phonetic details of speech include
phonemes, or speech sounds, and combina-tions of phonemes.
According to Stager and Werker, infants who are not yet learning words devote much attention to….
and older children concentrate their efforts on…
- phonetic details of speech
- word learning at the expense of fine phonetic detail
- Stager and Werker hypothesized that the 14-month-olds devoted their attention to learning the object name and did not notice the fine sound difference, whereas the 8-month-olds engaged in a simple sound discrimination task and were able to notice the phonetic distinction
Categorical perception
allows listeners to distinguish between phonemes so they can quickly and efficiently process incoming speech by ignoring those variations that are non-essential or nonmeaningful in their language.
Detection of Nonnative Phonetic Differences. Infants
- In the first year, they can distinguish among the sounds of all world languages, an ability older children and adults lack.
- ## up to about 6 months of age, infants learning English can distinguish between two different sounds in the Hindi language
perceptual narrowing
infants start to focus more on perceptual differences that are relevant to them (such as the difference between two native phonemes) and focus less on perceptual differences that are not relevant to them, or that they encounter less often (such as the difference between two nonnative phonemes),
- can happen in face perception and musical rhythm
- occurs over the second half of the first year of life in
Detection of Phonotactic Regularities.
- infants hear their native language more and more, they also develop the ability to recognize permissible combina-tions of phonemes in their language
- Infants’ ability to differentiate between permissible and impermissible sound sequences in their native language is present by about age 9 months]
- play a role in word learning
Categorical Perception of Speech
- we categorize input in ways that highlight differences in meaning.
- is an ability infants develop over the first year of life as they are exposed to lan-guage.
1st> infants categorize incoming sounds into speech and nonspeech sounds.
THEN, infants learn to categorize speech sounds according to the particular features of the sounds, such as whether the sound is voiced (doe) or voiceless (toe).
allophones
Variations of sounds in the same category
–lophones of a phoneme are measurably different from one another (such as in the amount of aspiration they contain), but they do not signal a difference in meaning between two words, as phonemes do.
voice onset time
is the interval between the release of a stop consonant (e.g., p, b, t, d) and the onset of vocal cord vibrations.
By age 4 months, infants can distinguish between
purposeful and accidental actions, and they appear to focus on the intentions underlying actions rather than the physical details of the actions
Over the first year, infants learn to view human actions as
goal-directed, mean-ing they pay attention to the outcomes and objects to which humans direct their actions rather than to other superficial perceptual properties of the event. F
Infants’ awareness of movement and understanding of the goals underlying actions are important precursors for language development because
once they understand the intentions behind actions, they, too, can engage in intentional communication by pointing, gesturing, and eventually using language.
Catogory formation
- The ability to form categories, or to group items and events according to the per-ceptual and conceptual features they share, is crucial for language development.
- the ability of infants ages 3–9 months to form categories predicts both their general cognitive and language abilities at age 2 years and their cognitive outcomes at age 2.5 years
the idea that object category formation is
hierarchical and includes three levels:
- superordinate,
- subordinate
- basic
superordinate level
- uppermost level
- describe the most general concept in a particular category
- EX: food, furniture, and clothing
- are among the later words children acquire (until preschool age)
subordinate level
- lowest level in a category hierarchy
- describe specific concepts in a category.
- EX: garbanzo, pinto, and kidney are subordinate terms for different types of beans.
basic level
- center of a category hierarchy
- describe general concepts in a category,
- EX: apple, chair, and shirt.
- Infants’ first categories are basic-level categories, just as their first words are basic-level words
infants use two types of categories at each level of the hierarchy:
-ceptual categories and conceptual categories