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1Psych 56L/ Ling 51:Acquisition of LanguageLecture 8Phonological Development IIIAnnouncementsHomework 1 returnedReview questions for phonological development availableMidterm review session on MondayMidterm next Wednesday- structure: ~30 matching, ~20 true/false, ~5 short answer- open-note (including IPA conversion chart), open-book, open-lecture-notes (printouts or on your laptop)Understanding How PhonologicalDevelopment WorksWhat we have to account for(1) Developmental changes that occur in speechperception and speech production(2) How children ultimately achieve the ability todistinguish and produce sound patterns of theirlanguage2Behaviorist TheoryIdea: use behaviorist mechanisms of imitation and reinforcementImplementation: Babies produce the sounds they do becausethey imitate the sounds they hear and get positivereinforcement for doing so.Behaviorist TheoryProblem: Ignores maturational constraints. Some sounds arelater because they’re harder to physically produce (ex: T, Z),not because they aren’t reinforced.Problem: Parents do not selectively reinforce speech sounds -parents delight in all kinds of sounds children make (ex:laughter, burps, raspberries, …)Problem: Phonology isn’t just about sounds - it’s also aboutdeveloping mental representations of contrastive sounds andthe rules for when sounds are combined together. This isn’tconscious knowledge, and so it’s not able to be reinforced.Behaviorist TheoryBasic Problem: Not fundamentally wrong, just mistaken. Positivereinforcement and a rich linguistic environment to imitatecertainly help phonological acquisition. They’re just notexclusively responsible for it.Rule & Constraint-Based ApproachesIdea: phonology is a system that represents sounds in terms offeatures and involves rules that operate over theserepresentations to produce speech. Children’s job is to learnthe rules and relevant features for their language.Two instantiations of this:(1) learning applicable phonological rules in Universal Grammar(2) learning rankings of rules in Optimality TheoryEnglish ASPIRATE rule: aspirate stop sound (like “t”) atbeginning of a word if it’s not in a consonant cluster;otherwise do not aspirate it“top” --> [tHap] “stop” --> [stap] “trip” --> [trIp]3Rule & Constraint-Based ApproachesIdea: phonology is a system that represents sounds in terms offeatures and involves rules that operate over theserepresentations to produce speech. Children’s job is to learnthe rules and relevant features for their language.Two instantiations of this:(1) learning applicable phonological rules in Universal Grammar(2) learning rankings of rules in Optimality TheoryNotice distribution of sounds & posit rule: ASPIRATE“top” --> [tHap] “stop” --> [stap] “trip” --> [trIp]Rule & Constraint-Based ApproachesIdea: phonology is a system that represents sounds in terms offeatures and involves rules that operate over theserepresentations to produce speech. Children’s job is to learnthe rules and relevant features for their language.Two instantiations of this:(1) learning applicable phonological rules in Universal Grammar(2) learning rankings of rules in Optimality TheoryNotice distribution of sounds & rank this rule above opposingrules: ASPIRATE more important than “pronounce all tsounds the same”“top” --> [tHap] “stop” --> [stap] “trip” --> [trIp]Biologically-Based TheoriesIdea: phonological system is driven by inherent biologicalconstraints (which then interact with the child’s experiencewith the language).Instantiation: development of sound is shaped by thedevelopment of the child’s motor capacity.Support 1: Correlation between development and crosslinguisticvariationSounds appearing early in infants’ vocal productions are mostcommon sounds among the world’s languages (ex: /m/).Sounds appearing late are the rarest (ex: /r/).Biologically-Based TheoriesIdea: phonological system is driven by inherent biologicalconstraints (which then interact with the child’s experiencewith the language).Instantiation: development of sound is shaped by thedevelopment of the child’s motor capacity.Support 2: Correlation between phonological processesemployed by children and crosslinguistic variationEx: Children often make a word-final consonant voiceless (ex:“bad” --> /bQt/, and this is a process some languages use(ex: German)4Cognitive Problem-Solving ApproachIdea: burden is on child’s problem-solving abilities (rather than,say, on biological constraints or prior knowledge). Predictssubstantial individual differences, correlating with individualproblem-solving abilities.Support: Research on individual differences still inconclusive.However, there does appear to be a common trajectory,despite disparities in individual problem-solving abilities.Connectionist ApproachIdea: rules are just a human’s way of dealing with regularities inthe data. What brains actually do is approximate the soundthey intend to produce using a neural network (ex: saying/wQbIt/ for “rabbit”). Predicts perception should be fine,however.Instantiation: Neural network representation, where sounds (like/k/) are connected to phonological features (like velar, stop,and voiceless)Connectionist Approach/kQtt/Connectionist Approach/ttQtt/Pronunciationmistake due toincorrect featureassociation5Connecting the Connectionist Approach toSpeech Perception:The Native Language Magnet TheoryEmpirical data: infants learn to distinguish native soundcontrasts and to ignore non-native sounds contrasts beforethey begin word-learning (~10-12 months)Idea: experience hearing sounds of one language altersinfant’s perception of distances among sounds, makingdifferences that do not matter perceptually smaller anddifferences that do matter perceptually larger.Connecting the Connectionist Approach toSpeech Perception:The Native Language Magnet TheoryPatricia KuhlNatural differences(acoustically salient)language datadifferences remaining“Perceptual Magnet”Connecting the Connectionist Approach toSpeech Perception:The Native Language Magnet TheoryIdea: Exposure to native language data produces dedicatedneural networks in the brain for processing native languagesounds. If patterns come in that do not match the featureassociations in these neural nets (ex: from a foreignlanguage), these patterns are not processed - and so notperceived.velar nasal palatal fricative voicedConnecting the Connectionist Approach toSpeech Perception:The Native


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