L7 Flashcards
(7 cards)
Werker and Tees 1984
Contrast between the english ba/pa and native american ki/qi
Can infants detect them?
Conditioned head turn procedure
Reward for turning heads when the sound changes.
6-8m english babies and native-american adults can spot differences.
8-10 m only 57% could spot, 10-12 only 1 of 10. (Crossectional)
Longitudinal study with 6 to 12 months old confirm these findings
“Ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts declines during first year of life.
Kuhl et al. (1992)
After the development of prototypes of a phoneme category, each nonprototypical member of the category is perceived as more similar to the category prototype than to each other.
Even if they are actually physically more distant
magnet effect
Test if magnet effect reflects experience with specific language and therefore babies show magnet effect for prototypes of their native language
6 m
English and Swedish-learning babies
vowel from English (/i/) or Swedish (/y/)
trained to turn head when prototype changed into a variant (acoustically similar sound, but not identical that would still be classified as i or y).
Nonnative worse than with native
Grouped vowel variants together for native, but not from the not native language
What is perceived as perceptually similar depended on input.
Kuhl, Tsao and Liu (2003)
Show decline in sensitivity to phonetic units of non-native languages between 6 and 12m
9m American infants
were 5 h exposed to Mandarin speakers
then tested for heir speech perception of Mandarin contrasts
Control group with english speaker
spoken in motherese, frequent eye contact
Exposed to mandarin chinese contrast that does not occur in English, better than control
Only visual-audio groups -> children interested in videos, but not able to distinguish better than control
Live speaker provide many subtle social cues that facilitate language acquisition
children learn language for a purpose, namely communication
Simple exposure to auditory sensory information is insufficient to trigger perceptual learning of phonology
Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996)
Phonotactics - Rules of which phoneme occur frequently or seldom after another
Test wether infants use phonotactic or transitional probabilities
8 m
3 syllable madeup words like bidaku and padoti
words repeated in random order, monotonous, no stress cues, no pauses
transitional probabilities were 1 in word, 0.33 between words
for 2 minutes
afterwards 12 test trials, 6 words already heard, 6 new sequences but sequences of madeup words (dapiku) of which transitional probability was 0
the 8 m dishabituated to the novel words
Do 8m also do to relative than absolute probabilities?
Now half were “part words” like kupado with probability of 0.33
still, children dishabituated (listened longer)
Show that they pick out they learned the structural property of the input.
Yusczyk, Houston and Newsome (1999)
Prosodic cues -> changes in duration and stress in speech
7 1/2 months 10 1/2 months
lot of two-syllable (bisyllables) words in english have a stressed-nonstressed structure, so words tend to begin stressed
Infants distinguish words in that way. They hear sentences like “The guitar is nice”
Habituation task
They treat taris as a word
They treat taris as more familiar than guitar during dishabituation phase.
10 1/2 months did not
Therefore sensitivity to the predominant stress patterns of English words i clearly important for segmentation.
Mandel, Jusczyk, and Pisoni (1995)
4 months
Can recognize their names
Habituation study
4 names, own, one foil same stress pattern, 2 foils with different pattern
Look right or left to hear one of the names
significantly longer look for own name -> distinguish from the other names and a salient cue!
A soundpattern already learned at 4 months i one’s own name
Bortfeld et al. (2005)
6 months
new words following ones own name or an unfamiliar name in a sentence
familiar and unfamiliar name conditions
listened longer in a preferential head turn paradigm to the word combined with own name than combined with another name
Same goes for combining after the word for mother
Sign for “top-down” processing
