Acquisition of Language Phonological Development, Slides of Psychology

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Psych 56L/ Ling 51:

Acquisition of Language

Lecture 8

Phonological Development III

Announcements

Pick up HW1 if you haven’t done so already

Be preparing for the midterm & working on the first part

of HW2 that covers phonology

Next class: midterm review - bring questions!!

What we have to account for

(1) Developmental changes that occur in speech perception and speech production

(2) How children ultimately achieve the ability to distinguish and produce sound patterns of their language

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Behaviorist Theory

Idea: use behaviorist mechanisms of imitation and reinforcement

Implementation: Babies produce the sounds they do because they imitate the sounds they hear and get positive reinforcement for doing so.

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Behaviorist Theory

Basic Problem: Not fundamentally wrong, just mistaken. Positive reinforcement and a rich linguistic environment to imitate certainly help phonological acquisition. They’re just not exclusively responsible for it.

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Rule & Constraint-Based Approaches

Idea: phonology is a system that represents sounds in terms of features and involves rules that operate over these representations to produce speech. Children’s job is to learn the 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 Theory

English ASPIRATE rule: aspirate stop sound (like “t”) at beginning of a word if it’s not in a consonant cluster; otherwise do not aspirate it

“top” --> [tHap] “stop” --> [stap] “trip” --> [trIp]

Rule & Constraint-Based Approaches

Two instantiations of this:

(1) learning applicable phonological rules in Universal Grammar

(2) learning rankings of rules in Optimality Theory

Notice distribution of sounds & rank this rule above opposing rules: ASPIRATE more important than “pronounce all t sounds the same”

“top” --> [tHap] “stop” --> [stap] “trip” --> [trIp]

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More important! ASPIRATE

Biologically-Based Theories

Idea: phonological system is driven by inherent biological constraints (which then interact with the child’s experience with the language).

Instantiation: development of sound is shaped by the development of the child’s motor capacity.

Support 1: Correlation between development and crosslinguistic variation Sounds appearing early in infants’ vocal productions are most common sounds among the world’s languages (ex: [m]). Sounds appearing late are the rarest (ex: [T]).

Cognitive Problem-Solving Approach

Idea: burden is on child’s problem-solving abilities (rather than, say, on biological constraints or prior knowledge). Predicts substantial individual differences, correlating with individual problem-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.

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Connectionist Approach

Idea: rules are just a human’s way of dealing with regularities in the data. What brains actually do is approximate the sound they intend to produce using a neural network (ex: saying /wQbIt/ for “rabbit”).

Instantiation: Neural network representation, where sounds (like /k/) are connected to phonological features (like velar, stop, and voiceless)

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Connectionist Approach

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/tQt/

Pronunciation mistake due to incorrect feature association

Connecting the Connectionist Approach to

Speech Perception:

The Native Language Magnet Theory

Empirical data: infants learn to distinguish native sound contrasts and to ignore non-native sounds contrasts before they begin word-learning (~10-12 months)

Idea: experience hearing sounds of one language alters infant’s perception of distances among sounds, making differences that do not matter perceptually smaller and differences that do matter perceptually larger.

The Native Language Magnet Theory

Infants maintain contrasts being used in their language and lose all the others.

Patricia Kuhl

Natural boundaries (acoustically salient)

“Perceptual Magnet”

The Native Language Magnet Theory

Patricia Kuhl

Sounds from Language 1

“Perceptual Magnet”

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Infants maintain contrasts being used in their language and lose all the others.