Lecture 2 - Phonological Development

Question 1

Why should we care about language development?

Answer 1

• Fascinating = complexity of human development
• Important: practitioners can help diagnose difficulties in disorders and there is an impact beyond psychology

Question 2

Define Language

Answer 2

• System of symbols and rules that enable us to communicate

Question 3

How do infants learn languages?

Answer 3

• Listening

Question 4

What are problems when learning a language?

Answer 4

• Segmentation: speech is continuous not broken up
• Lack of invariance: Different signals should be perceived as the same sound
• Speaker Variability: Each speaker sounds a bit different

Question 5

What is sound?

Answer 5

Waves of increasing/decreasing in air pressure

Question 6

How is speech turned into a spectrogram?

Answer 6

• Caused by waves of many diff frequencies
• Each has its own energy level
• Ear decomposes the sound wave into frequency & energy
• Can see this through a spectrogram

Question 7

How is lack of segmentation seen on a spectrogram?

Answer 7

• Boundaries are not clear

Question 8

How is lack of invariance seen on a spectrogram?

Answer 8

The same sounds have different patterns

Question 9

What are darker areas on a spectrogram?

Answer 9

• Higher energy areas

Question 10

How do adult listeners make sense of adult speech?

Answer 10

• Despite speech being continuous, listeners perceive it as discrete sounds
• Each language has phonemes & listeners perceive phonemes through phoneme identification tasks

Question 11

What is Voice Onset Time

Answer 11

• Delay between the start of a speech sound and the vibration of the vocal cords

Question 12

What does word bias do? (Phoneme identification)

Answer 12

• Phoneme identification helps adults make sense out of speech

Question 13

What is phoneme restoration?

Answer 13

• Phoneme replaced by something and you replace it with a phoneme you expect to hear
  E.g cough covers up word, use context to make word fit in sentence

Question 14

What are the three types of infant phoneme recollection?

Answer 14

• High amplitude sucking: younger children = suck more if they recognise
• Head turn preference
• Preferential looking

Question 15

What is a study that shows newborn language discrimination?

Answer 15

• Their language vs others
• Babies were read stories and were either French/American
• French babies could discriminate French vs Russian but not English vs Italian
• American babies could discriminate between English vs Italian but not between French vs Russian

Question 16

What are prenatal language perceptions?

Answer 16

• 4 Months before birth
• Low frequencies
• Rhythms and prosody (not phonemes)

Question 17

Phoneme perception in adulthood

Answer 17

• Adults are not good at recognising phonemes we do not hear around us
• Babies can differentiate between them

Question 18

What are the perception of phonemes as we grow up?

Answer 18

• In adults = non-native phonetic discrimination is very difficult
• As we grow = native phonetic contrasts increase

Question 19

What is neural plasticity?

Answer 19

• Humans are born early in development = allows for tuning/shaping of neural circuitry in interaction with the environment e.g ability to recognise faces and vowels

Question 20

What is neural commitment?

Answer 20

• Initial native language learning = neural commitment
• Brain across development = more specialised and more committed to native language

Question 21

What is the brain shape graph

Answer 21

• Synapses go up, and then are pruned as we specialise in language
• Seen in cortical specialisation between seeing/hearing to receptive language speech production e.g Early deprivation of sight = problems later on in life & long-term consequences
• Higher cognitive functions occur later
• brain is hierarchical