Learning Sound Patterns - Where Are the Words?

12 important questions on Learning Sound Patterns - Where Are the Words?

On which theory is our infant cognition based on?


One simple observation: when babies are faced with new sounds or images, they devote their attention to them differently than when they hear/see old, familiar sounds or images

What is one commonly used technique that is used to give insights about baby habits?

Head-turn preference paradigm
- compares how long babies keep their heads turned toward different stimuli, which is used to measure their attention

What do they mean by the "test phase" when studying baby habits?


Period in which subjects’ responses to the critical experimental stimuli is tested after the familiarization phase. Responses to familiar stimuli are compared with responses to unfamiliar stimuli.
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What does it mean when babies spend more or less time looking at the previously presented word than they with the new word?

They learned something and see it as familiar
However: if the attention is equal it suggests they did not learn enough to differentiate

Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) used the head-turn paradigm to tackle what question?

Whether babies have learned where word breaks occur

During the test phase of Jusczyk and Aslin, it was measured how long the babies were interested in the word bike in comparison to unknown words like dog. What did they use to get their attention?

A flashing light that appeared above the loudspeaker where the word was coming from

What did the study of Jusczyk and Aslin show?


7.5 months babies are equipped with some ability to separate or segment words from the speech stream. However, the study does not show how they manage those skills and how the researchers decided the words

What did Heather Bortfeld (2005) find about 6 months old, when using the head-turn preference paradigm?

They could learn to segment words like bike or feet out of sentences, but only if they appeared next to their own names

What kind of intuition do babies have, next to their sound stream trick?

Which sounds or sequences are allowed to be used at the end and beginning of words, to guess where the boundaries are likely to be.

What exactly do they mean with phonotactic constraints?

Language-specific constraints that determine how the sounds of a given language may be combined to form words or syllables.

What happens with a word with trochaic stress pattern?


the first syllable is stressed (as in BLACKmail)

What happens with a word with iambic stress pattern?


the first syllable is unstressed (as in reTURN).

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