LING 321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Baby Talk, Phonotactics
18 Dec 2017
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Children must find individual words in the continuous stream: lookattheprettybaby: infants use different cues by 9 months, they track the statistics of segments and syllables. They use rhythmic and phonotactic cues: prosody: anything that is not segmental. Stress (word [present vs. present] and phrase stress/prominence [questions]). Compounds vs. phrases (hotdog vs. hot dog): phonotactics: what sounds are allowed to be put together in a specific language. Child directed speech: utterances are shorter, so there are fewer words to find in each, exaggerated intonation and stress patterns might highlight words (exaggerating prosody) After identifying a word, we must figure out what it means: map the word to a referent. Many possibilities: quine: interdeterminacy problem you can not determine the referent based on the information you have. Children start with some innate ability to associate new nouns whole objects. Children are able to make an initial fast mapping on the basis of only a few exposures.
