LD_W4

The speech signal presents us with:

• exactly the right amount of information that we need to recognize what is being said

• less information than we need to recognize what is being said

• more information than we need to recognize what is being said

Phoneme is ...

• a sound that makes a meaning difference in a word

• a sound that comes in the middle of the word

• a sound that is pronounced differently depending where it comes in the word

• a sound that cannot come at the beginning of a word

Which of the following can newborns distinguish at birth?

• a book their mother read to them in the womb vs. an unfamiliar book

• their mother's voice vs. the voice of another woman

• a person speaking their mother's language vs. a different language

• all of these options

• none of these options

Voice onset time (VOT) is the delay between the start of a speech sound and the beginning of vocal cord vibration. It has the following properties:

• slower for men than women

• the same for every consonant in the language

• not one length but rather a range of milliseconds (categorical)

• longer for voiceless than voiced consonants

Universal Theory (Werker & Tees) states that:

• infants have innate ability to roughly partition sounds into categories

• infants have innate ability to discriminate all phones in all languages

• infants lose ability to discriminate phones not meaning-relevant in own language

• predicts that L2 learners cannot learn ‘foreign’ phonemes

• predicts that L2 learners can learn ‘foreign’ phonemes with enough input

Attunement Theory (Kuhl) states that:

• infants have innate ability to roughly partition sounds into categories

• infants have innate ability to discriminate all phones in all languages

• infants calculate statistics to determine phonemes prototypes for own language

• predicts that L2 learners cannot learn ‘foreign’ phonemes

• predicts that L2 learners can learn ‘foreign’ phonemes with enough input

chinchillas and macaque monkeys can be trained to perceive sounds categorically

• True

• False

rats can differentiate languages based on acoustic information like prosody

• True

• False

speech perception skills are specific to humans (i.e. speech perception skills are not found in other types of animals)

• True

• False

children tune their perception of phonemes specific to their language between 8 and 12 months of age

• True

• False