LING 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Categorical Perception, University Of Manchester, Phoneme
Document Summary
Babies are particularly interested in visual stimuli that look like faces. Seem to know from early age that speech comes from faces. Infants as young as 2 months of age become visibly distressed when they see their mother talking in front of them but hear her voice coming from elsewhere. Infants as young as 18 months also recognise that particular movements visible in faces correspond to particular speech sounds & look longer at faces whose movements match the speech sounds they are hearing. Measures of brain activity (erps) also suggest that 4 month old infants also expect speech to be accompanied by a face that is looking forward rather than a face with averted eye gaze. These early perceptual abilities mean that even tho infants do not understand lang, the world they exp has some order to it. Infants" perceptual system allows infants to dist b/n diff speech sounds.
