Infant perception of phonotactics: the roles of statistical frequency and acoustic salience
Date
2012
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Abstract
There is an abundance of evidence that infants possess a mechanism that tracks statistical regularities in the input. During the process of language acquisition, infants' perceptual system interacts with statistical information in the speech stream. Processing this information depends on initial perceptual biases, the infant's developmental level, and the particular task at hand (Werker & Curtin, 2005). Initially the system tracks information based on the raw acoustic salience of the speech input, but over time experience with the native language can shift perception. In this dissertation, I examine how knowledge acquired about the native language influences infants' perception of sound sequences, segmentation of words from the speech stream, and word-object mapping. Chapter 2 investigates infants' sensitivity to type or token frequency in onset phonotactics. Here, infants of 9-months, but not 6- months, showed a novelty preference for low frequency stop-liquid onsets, suggesting that they are sensitive to the frequency in which native language phonotactics occur. Chapter 3 explores infants' segmentation of words that contain legal or illegal onset clusters. Only infants in the legal condition successfully segmented the target word from the fluent speech stream, which demonstrates that knowledge of phonotactics influences segmentation. Chapter 4 focuses on the whether the salience of a contrast influences infants' ability to map novel words to novel objects. Fourteen-month-olds mapped words containing a liquid contrast in word-initial position, but were less successful when the liquid was embedded in a cluster or when the singleton onset liquid was shortened. Together these findings demonstrate that young infants track the frequency in which sound patterns co-occur, use this infonnation speech segmentation, and rely on the acoustic salience of a contrast to detect subtle differences in word forms. The findings of these studies suggest that as infants' representations form, they influence the subsequent processing of information. Stored word forms and a developing sound system work together to build the lexicon and the phonological system. The findings provide support for PRIMIR, and demonstrate the importance of the infant's emerging lexical knowledge in the perception, segmentation, and learning of words.
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Bibliography: p. 79-91
Includes copies of ethics approval and copyright permission. Original copies with original Partial Copyright Licence.
Includes copies of ethics approval and copyright permission. Original copies with original Partial Copyright Licence.
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Archer, S. (2012). Infant perception of phonotactics: the roles of statistical frequency and acoustic salience (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/4888