LING 290 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Innateness Hypothesis, Vocal Tract, Noam Chomsky
2 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
1-month-old infants reinforced for energetic sucks with a speech sound [ba] Once a new sound is introduced, the sucking rate increases again. Experiment to pre-linguistic infants: high amplitude sucking paradigm (pacifier sucking experiments) Increase in sucking rate implies discrimination of the new speech sound. The infants are still open to the change of sounds. Toy waver on left, sound presented on the right [ra] Baby turns his head when there is a change of sound, with a reward of the toy in the right box lights up. Able to discriminate speech sounds even when these sounds are not used in the language they are exposed to. Japanese infants can distinguish between [ra] and [la], with a f3 difference. Infants do not increase sucking rate or turn their head when they suddenly hear an [a] sound spoken by a female after hearing many [a] from a male.
