W1 Prelinguistic Speech Processing✅ Flashcards
Understand how infants/newborns are able to comprehend and distinct different sounds in a speech.
What are the 5 basis of language?
- Generative
- Comprised of small combinable units (phonology)
- Conveys meaning (semantic)
- Word organisation rules (syntax)
- Social (communicate tool)
What are the 3 common infant study designs?
- Preference study: no training, infants’ preference (look/listen)
- Habituation: train infants to listen to stimuli & measure what infants prefer
- Change detection: train to respond to a change -> can tell the difference between two sounds
Features of language in infant study?
- Prosody: pattern of stress and intonation
- Phonemes: perceptually distinct units of sound (e.g. b/p, d/t)
-> each language is different
What are the evidence & conclusion on whether newborns can recognise change in languages, prosody and phonemes?
- Prosody
a. Foetal auditory system is fully functioning in last trimester -> pre-birth learning
b. Conclusion:
* Prefer own mother’s voice.
* Can discriminate languages with different prosody (German/Spanish) but not similar (English/Dutch).
* Prefer own native language
* Cry with an accent - Phonemes
a. Worldwide, 600 consonants & 200 vowels, but any language uses ~40.
b. Conclusion:
* Children originally babble with wide range of sounds -> specialise to produce only sounds of target language (familiarisation)
* Ability to discriminate all sounds, inc. foreign phonemes at (1-2 months) then declines (from 7-11 months)
How infants comprehend/segment words in a sentence?
a. Can segment words from native language from ~7.5 months (NOT 6 months since these infants fail in Jsjjsjd & Aslin, 1995)
b. How?
- Using statistics:
* track co-occurrence of syllables -> high frequency means likely part of same word.
* evidence: 8-months old listen to made-up language stream + familarise -> listen longer to part-words - Using prosody:
* Learn from Infant directed speech (IDS)
* Infants prefer to listen to IDS and interact with people who use IDS.
* evidence: Infants segment speech better with IDS than normal (adult-directed) speech - High frequency words as an anchor words to segment:
* salient words (e.g. Mummy, child’s name)
=> 6-month-olds use salient words (Mummy, child’s name) to segment words
* linguistic words (e.g. the, he/she) -> article, pronouns
=> 8-month-old infants use ‘the’ to segment words
What are some features of Infant directed speech (IDS)?
- Higher pitched
- Slower speaking
- Important word exaggerated & at the end
- Boundaries between phrases enhanced
-> easier to segment speech
How infants can figure out pattern of words (how words are organised)?
- Frequency:
* Frequent words = function words
* Learn word order (where function words are placed)
* Evidence: 8-month-olds from different countries listen longer to word order in their native languages -> already learn the ordering rules - Rule learning:
* Syntax requires learning the abstract rules of a language (grammar)
* 6-month-olds learn abstract rule with linguistic stimuli (ABA & BAA)
-> Familarise with word pattern AND listen longer to new linguistic pattern.
What are some issues with these studies’ findings for pre-linguistic language development in infants?
- How much language acquisition can these skills explain? (content validity)
- Infants do well in highly-controlled experiment, but what about real world? (lacks ecological validity)
Conclusion for prelinguistic speech learning in infants?
Findings: Infants show impressive skills in language acquisition in 1st year.
* Identifying sounds through statistics, patterns & word boundaries.
* Early preferences and skills to learn complex language.
* Familiarise with specifics of their language (sounds, order) before they even speak.
What are 3 things infants need to be able to do to learn language?
- identify sounds in native language
- segment speech to smaller units
- organise word in order to form meanings
