PS366 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Phoneme, Categorical Perception, Speech Perception
Document Summary
Children learn language through general purpose learning mechanisms. Babies are not born with innate language knowledge. This approach believes you do not have knowledge when you are born, no knowledge about language to learn, you use language algorithms. Language ability results from adaption and natural selection. Babies are born with innate learning mechanisms that enable language learning (for any language) Mechanisms cause children to pay attention to specific aspects of environment that facilitates language learning. But, being born with certain types of knowledge does not imply that it is innate. This is more closer to the truth about what is innate. Learning starts before birth: 2 day old infants discriminate native from non-native language, result of pre-natal exposure, not instinct. Distinguish speech from birth, orient to speech. Function of tension something grabs their attention, they suck harder. There are pacifiers that measure how hard and how frequent a baby sucks: we can use this for testing on different occasions/situations.
