PSYC 304 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Multimodal Distribution, Habituation, Unimodality

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 304
• Professor: Kristine Onishi

Document Summary

Last class we looked at whether children are able to discriminate between two languages. Kids can distinguish languages when one of those languages is from the same stress/rhythm category as their own native language. Mehler study: french-speaking kids were tested on english (stress-timed), japanese (mora-timed) and dutch (stress-timed) None of these are the stress pattern of french (syllable-timed) They could discriminate between english and japanese because they are in different categories. They could not discriminate between english and dutch because they are in the same category, but this is not the stress category of french. There is something about the quality of the language that allows kids to distinguish between them. We listened to a continuum (vot) of speech sounds that went from (cid:494)ba(cid:495) to (cid:494)pa(cid:495) The continuum was graded continuously, but listeners heard them as all (cid:494)ba(cid:495)s and then all of a sudden all (cid:494)pa(cid:495)s.