Lecture 8 Podcast

Question 1

sounds can show up on some words but not on others:

Answer 1

they can rocket but not bread (bwread)

well do they “know” how to say/use “r” or not?

Question 2

a lot of the studies that investigate how kid’s language change, do this by:

Answer 2

look at a particular or small set of kids for a period of time

is that representative? yes and no: every kids has to go from not saying any sounds at all to adult-speech: so you can capture some of the patterns that show up across children

Question 3

kids produce sounds ok: but then as they learn more words they seem to get worse at producing certain sounds

(longitudinal study)

1971 Study

Answer 3

looked at one child:

reducing consonant cluster: produce down properly but produce stone as done but then start doing this thing that looks more immature: producing nown and none:

later on: new oral-vowel nasal words (n or m), instead of producing the initial consonant correctly they do assimilation

Question 4

assimliation

Answer 4

take properties of one sound in the word and sort of mush them onto another sound in a word

Question 5

assimilation in adults

Answer 5

• not atypical to adult speech: “lean bacon” actually saying the “n” in lean as an “m” because they’re anticipating the bilabial articulation of bacon at the end of the word lean
• green peas = greem peas (not an error, how you produce natural fluent speech)

Question 6

assimilation not typical to adult speech (errors that kids make)

Answer 6

• assimilation from the consonant at the end of the word to the consant at the beginning of the word:
  
  • ​means instead of beans: nasalization getting mushed onto the beginnnig of the word (nasalization of b is m)
  • nance instead of dance (nasalization of d is n)
  • well –> wew
  • cat, dog, and pug –> tat, gog, gug
    *

Question 7

kids aren’t actually regressing,

what is going on when it looks like kids are “getting worse” at speech sounds?

Answer 7

as they’re learning more words, they’re figuring out that there’s a pattern

as they learn more words they pick up on patterns that are similar across those words and then use that more than they should (overregularized)

Question 8

some words seem to be accurate “too early”

Answer 8

kid doesn’t produce the sound “h” except in “hi” and “hello”

say *horse, hose, *and *hamster *as orse, ‘ose, ‘amster

has this child acquired *“h” *or not?

they’re learning entire word forms, not a unitary construct of “*h-ness”, *they’re just learning entire word forms

Question 9

can’t talk about whether kids have acquired a single sound, because

Answer 9

they’re acquiring sounds within the contexts of particular words

(they don’t have print knowledge to generalize across word categories - like h-ness)

Question 10

think of a child like a problem solver:

how do i sound like the people around me?

Answer 10

• avoiding dificult sounds or sound sequences (David Sedaris avoiding “s” sounds)
• exploit sounds or sound patterns that you like
• simplifying by reducing clusters or assimilating
  
  • replace one sound with another (assimilation = simplifiying the information in a word = less info to have to represent or motorically control )
• mushmouths (mushy approximation of an entire phrase): modualted babble a bit: saying something clearly longer than a word (could be a sentence) but is unitelligble

Question 11

other kinds of influences on language production that aren’t strategic, but are instead built into the physiology of the human body

Answer 11

stop consonants are physically easier than fricatives (much easier to do a simple open and shut movement)

duh vs. zaah

fricatives are more subtle

Question 12

perceptual feedback: children with hearing impairments

Answer 12

it’s hard to learn to produce the words of your language if you don’t have an internal, acoustic model you can only get external feedback

internal feedback isn’t happening

Question 13

internal feedback

Answer 13

is immediate (running into an electric fence)

“that doesn’t quite match” (wabbit): kid knows what it’s supposed to sound like but can’t quite match it (error signal)

Question 14

external feedback

Answer 14

temporal delay between producing a sound and getting the feedback that it’s not correctly produced

not as effective as internal feedback

Question 15

normal progression of sound production in english is starting out around age 3 kids can do ____ but ____ are harder

Answer 15

vowels (not so hard)

consonants

Question 16

tougher consonants

Answer 16

• *r *and l
• *vah *
• dtha (thicket)

should be intelligle by age 4

Question 17

age 8

Answer 17

mostly producing adult-like sounds

slower speach rate

more variable pronunciation

Question 18

ways to best describe how kids are changing sound forms into “kid forms”

(slighlty different flavors of explanation

Answer 18

• a rule: maybe a kid always deletes an “s” = for school they say “gool” and for snowman they say “nowman”
• constraints: avoid consonant clusters entirely
• template: when they produce a word or syllable they try to keep it close to those template as possible

caveat: what we hear kids producing is being filtered through our own mature, adult phological systems

Question 19

fined grained acoustic analysis

Answer 19

• maybe the kid is making distinctions but we just can’t hear that they’re making a distinction because they’re not making it as much as an adult is
• maybe if we use fine grained acoustic analysis that they are using that distinction to a degree
• want multiple measurements of the same word at a given age (want a picture of how much variability there is in their production - phases where a new form coexists with an old one)
  *

Question 20

distinction between “single-word-kids” and multi-word “mush-mouth” kids

Answer 20

• referential: one word at a time (door,ball)
• expressive style: fluent speech that is less intelligble, maybe closer to casual speech

Question 21

influences of kid’s apparent mispronunciations

Answer 21

• experiential vs. referential
• regional variance in pronunciation: define correctness by asking are they learning the dialect that they’re exposed to?
• variance in context: lab settings are not the normal environmnet
  *

Question 22

things that are harder

Answer 22

• clusters
• consants at the end of syllables: closed syllables (bab)
• long words (caterpiller)
• initial weak syllables (guitar)
  *

Question 23

babbling

Answer 23

is just consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel = open syllables because they don’t have a consonant at the end to “close them off”

open: baa

Question 24

solutions for difficult language

Answer 24

• words like sock: ommit the “s” sound
• assimilate place: gock for sock or gog for dog (taking the place of the final consonant and sticking it onto the initial consonant)
• weak initial syllable: nanna for banana or sert for dessert
  
  • not necessarily because they’re longer words, they can say two syllable words that are strong inital (can say puppy)

Question 25

place assimilation

Answer 25

place of articulation of the final consonant is moving up to the initial consonant

Question 26

canonical form

Answer 26

• adult words that are similar that the kid is performing based on the same template
• kid is over-using the template to get close to adult words
  
  • ex: fish, dish, vest, fetch
  • rules that change the adult word to fit the kid’s production template

Question 27

template example

Answer 27

• orange (arnage gush), mr. rogers (mr. ardage), sausage (ardage)
• “i’ve got this scheme that kind of works, then i’m gunna use it for a bunch of stuff”
• having a template and using it in multiple situations
• this production has very little to do with not understanding

Question 28

Adult sounds that are perceptually confusible

Answer 28

• austically similar: so kids confuse them
• fing instead of thing
  *

Question 29

kids are good at discriminating the speech sound contrasts in their native language, which suggests….

Answer 29

…that they have no problems telling apart the speech sounds (with a few exceptions)

Question 30

Gerken study

if kids really don’t care about unstressed weak syllables you should be able to substitue them for each other and it wouldn’t matter

Answer 30

• ” find the dog for me” v.s. “ find was dog for me”
• they are paying attention, but producing those syllables could be difficult
• Findings: can hear weak syllables and if there are the wrong weak syllables they have trouble comprehending