LING 810 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Complementary Distribution
15 May 2019
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Ling 810 week 2 reading - feldman et al. , 2013. Word-level information influences phonetic learning in adults and infants. Infants segment words and learn phonetic categories around the same time. This article shows that phonetic learning does not occur in isolation - infants pay attention to the words in which sounds appear. One experiment with adults and a second one with 8 month old infants. Between 8-10 months, infants perception of native language contrasts is enhanced. Researchers are interested in how this is possible. Distributional learning theory: infants pay attention to the statistics of sounds and identify phonetic categories based on the modes of the distribution. Experiments show that adults and infants both are more likely to assign two phonetic categories to a bimodal distribution of sounds on a continuum. However, in certain languages, and especially for vowels, there is a high degree of overlap between phonetic categories.
