Infant Speech Perception & Production

• prosody


  pitch/frequency, duration/length, loudness/intensity
• stress


  emphasis on certain syllables within a word
• intonation


  emphasis within a phrase/sentence
• infant age


  birth to about 1 year
• prelinguistic communication


  communication before children use conventional words
• when do infants start hearing langauge?


  in utero, they hear their mother's speech (around 3rd trimester)
• do infants like their native language?


  yes, newborns prefer listening to their mother, native language, and stories they've heard their mother read a lot while pregnant
• high amplitude sucking paradigm


  infants sucking pacifier, will increase sucking rate if they are interested in something, keep giving what they're interested in , over time, sucking rate will decrease as child habituates, give them something new, if sucking rate increases, they noticed the difference
• head turn preference


  play two types of sound stimuli (one to the right of the child and one to the left), play each sound, infants will tend to look toward the sound, if the infant more frequently turns to one side, they have preference for that sound
• 6-8 months (speech perception)


  infants can distinguish all phonemes in all langauges
• 8-10m (speech perception)

  ability to distinguish all phonemes decreases
• 12m (speech perception)


  infants can only distinguish phonemes in their native language
• perceptual narrowing


  focus less on differences that aren't as important or meaningful
• categorical perception


  we perceive sounds as belonging to categories, if 2 phones/sounds sound the same = one phoneme (some differences = allophones), if they sound different = different phonemes, allows us to focus on sounds that can signal a difference in meaning
• transitional probabilities/phonotactic regularities


  sounds that often occur together are thought to be part of the same word, sounds that typically occur at the end of the word are expected to be the END of the word (same for those at the beginning of words), infants focus on SOUND not meaning
• attending to social patterns


  birth to 6m, infants look at faces and can maintain attention
• joint attention


  6m-1 year, infant and one other person are both mentally focused on the same object, relates to later vocab learning, increased in this leads to increased sustained attention later
• infant directed speech (motherese)


  higher pitched, exaggerated/more variable pitch, slower rate with longer pauses, short, simple utterances, more content words than function, repetitions and asking questions
• how do infants feel about infant directed speech?


  infants enjoy it, even at 2 days old they prefer it, pausing/repetition allows children to parse words, attracts their attention
• caregiver responsiveness


  ways to respond to a child relate to improved language outcomes for kids, wait and listen, follow the child's lead, join in/play, be face to face, use a variety of questions/labels, turn taking, expand/extend the child's utterances
• reflexive vocalizations


  birth to 2m, crying, coughing, burping, sneezing
• cooing stage


  2-4m, cooing/gooing, usually vowels and sounds in the back of the mouth
• vocal play


  4-6m, vowels, some consonant like sounds, raspberries, playing with loudness and pitch
• canonical babbling


  6m+, CV syllables that seem real, reduplicated babbling (common at 6m), variegated babbling (common at 12-13m)
• phonemes produced in canonical babbling


  at 6m frontal sounds (m, b, p,), at 12m stops, nasals, glides (k, g)
• jargon


  10m +, varied syllables, varies stress/intonation, no meaning to the speech, may use gesture, shows child's knowledge on social use of language
• linguistic communication


  develops towards the end of the first year, 1st words occur around one year
• articulation


  moving the articulators to produce speech sounds
• voice


  vibrating vocal folds to produce audible sound, changing shape of vocal tract to change resonance
• fluency


  rhythm and flow of speech
• reduplicated babbling


  syllables are the same

  
  

  ex: ma ma ma ma
• variegated babbling


  syllables differ

  
  

  ex: ma ba ga da