Language Flashcards
central aspect of language
communication
language is important for…
- learning (without learning only conditioning and observing)
- daily life (social exchange, ook gossip!)
- culture (art, science, technology)
- humanity (laws, human rights)
language 2 forms
comprehension: hearing, reading
production: speech, writing
is language difficult?
Intuition
– Simple
– Easy to learn
– Thinking about your message is difficult,
speech itself goes effortlessly
In reality
– Besides the message, lots of muscles and
motor programming involved for each
speech sound (zie xray ken stevens -> je gebruikt een hele hoop spieren!)
source filter model
- air expelled from the lungs
- vocal cords in larynx produce basic frequencies
- final sound door influence oral and nasal cavities
speech sounds change depending on the context
(bv it takes one to know one)
wat is de hierarchy van speech
discourse - sentence - words - sound/phones - phoneme
phones
the physical speech sound itself (k in kit and skill is perceived as the same, even though it is different)
phoneme
smallest unit of sound that causes a difference in meaning (bag - bat)
3 kenmerken van phonemes
- phoneme =/= meaning (two, too, to = zelfde phoneme)
- phoneme =/= letters (e in deserve zijn anders)
- phonemes only exist in our minds
how do we produce words
Use of rules
– Which orders of sounds are allowed?
– Different for each language
* In Dutch: not more than four subsequent consonant
sounds in one syllable
– Herfst
* Train station name in Wales:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
– For most people the rules are completely
unconscious
Permitted speech-sound order can be formally
described in grammar
how do we produce sentences
Use of rules
– Which orders of words are allowed?
– Different for each language
* I see that John kicks the dog
– English is a Subject Verb Object-language (SVO)
* Ik zie dat Jan de hond slaat
– Dutch is an SOV-language
– Again, for most completely unconscious!
The rules that define the structure of words
in a sentence can be formally described in a
syntax
grammar=
permitted speech-sound order
synthax=
the structure of words in a sentence
gekke aan speech-sound perception
we horen altijd hetzelfde, hoewel er verschillen zitten tussen…
- woorden (bet en bee)
- verschillen tussen speakers (man-vrouw)
- verschillen within speakers (als je ziek bent)
- coarticulation (a sound gets influenced by a sound that came before that)
- physical differences between the same phoneme within different words
hoe zit het met phonemes bij babies tijdens eerste 6 maanden
- babies can hear all phonemes until 6 mo
- after 6 mo: they can still hear all possible phonemes of every language, but start to prefer phonemes from their own language
na 6 maanden wat doen babies
use phonetic protoypes (perceptual magnets) to group phones to phonemes in their own language.
but similer phones that group in other languages are still perceived as individual phones
example experiment phonemes babies
On each trial, babies heard
the prototype and a variant,
both for English /i/ and
Swedish /y/
When they detected a
change they made a head
turn
– Rewarded by a toy bear
playing a miniature drum
experiment grafiek interpreteren
Y-axes: percentage of
trials in which children
did not move their head
(indicating they did not
hear a difference):
Red = American /i/
Blue = Swedish /y/
6 month old babies were
better to discriminate the
two sounds in the nonnative
language
(dus lagere scores = beter)
dus similar phones in own language vs similar phones in other languages
own: grouped to phonemes due to perceptual magnets
other: remain perceived as individual, different phones
hoe heet perceptual magnets ook wel
categorical perception
phonetic prototypes
wat als we een artificially made gradual change is (bijv van ba naar da)
we only hear abrupt changes
na 10 maanden
babies horen geen verschil meer tussen twee tonen uit hindi
dus newborn, 6 mo and after 1 year regarding phonemes:
new-borns: can differentiate between all posible phonemes
6 mo: can discriminate phonemmes from non-native language better
after one year: babies have lost the ability to hear all possible phonemes. horen alleen categorieën en de relevante verschillen tussen phonemes voor eigen taal.
dus na 1 jaar
After 1 year, babies have lost the ability to
hear all possible phonemes… -> tuned in to own mother tongue!
- They distinguish between native phonemes
- They fail to distinguish between non-native
phonemes which would not cause a different
phonemic concept in their mother tongue
