ECE 343 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Functional Load, Phonological Development, Allophone
6 Oct 2020
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Parents try to teach infants these words first. They are easy to pronounce, and coincidentally mean mother and father in english. They are easy for babies to pronounce and are therefore produced early. This historically led to their use as words for mother and father . If hypothesis (3) is correct, we should see that the words for mother and. Father use early-developing speech sounds across unrelated world languages. English examples: vowels have high functional load in english. E. g. , pen, pin, pun, pine, pan all differ only in the vowel. Across languages, more frequent sounds and sounds with high functional load are more likely to be acquired earlier. Example: /v/ is acquired earlier in swedish than english. In english, the sound is relatively infrequent and does not create many minimal pairs compared to swedish. Speech sounds are acoustic signals languages use to express meaning. In english, aspiration is not a distinctive feature. In thai, aspiration is a distinctive feature/carries meaning.
