LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Prosodic Unit, Phonotactics, Speech Perception
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Infants as young as 2 days can discriminate between their native language and another language. Mehler et al. (1988) showed that 4 day old children born of. French-speaking parents could discriminate between french and russian. Prosody of the input: refers to aspects of language such as intonation, stress, etc. Not just due to familiarity with sounds heard in the womb or after birth since infants can also discriminate between two nonnative languages. Mehler et al. found that children of french- speaking parents could discriminate between english and. Italian, with no previous exposure to either language. By manipulating the input used in these kinds of experiments, researchers have shown that the following are not what the infant is attending to: Properties of individual segments: they can do that but they don"t pay attention to that in particular. Intonational contour of words: for words with multiple syllables. Infants are sensitive to suprasegmental properties of utterances.
