LING 321 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Richard N. Aslin, Syntactic Bootstrapping, Null-Subject Language
6 Nov 2017
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Speech perception in infants eimas et al. Infants are able to sort acoustic variations of adult phonemes into categories. Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of. 10mo was okay, and age 6-8mo was pretty good: unless the kids were native speakers of the language, those kids were still accurate at. 11-12 months, showing that specific linguistic experience is necessary to maintain phonetic discrimination ability: experiment 3: perhaps older infants would rather go to the toy instead of just looking at it, tested 6-7mo, 8-9mo, 10-11mo. Infants can discriminate many phonetic distinctions across natural languages without relevant experience: the decline in ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts occurs within first year of life. Innate ability to perceive speech sounds aids in language learning process by allowing selective tuning of initial sensitivities in accordance with a specific phonology: decline happens just before kids start producing first words.
