PSY 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 83: Phoneme

• School: Pace University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 112
• Professor: Siporin

Document Summary

Linguists have identified more than 800 different phonemes among all the world"s languages. English speakers use just 52 phonemes to produce words, Other languages use as few as 15 to as many as 141. Differences in phonemes are one reason people have difficulty learning other languages. Ex: (cid:498)the bus hit diane(cid:499) = we just saw a bus crash into diane. Ex: (cid:498)diane was hit by a bus(cid:499) = we say to explain why diane didn"t show up for class: language development in babies: There are important steps to the development of language in infants: babble: speech-like but meaningless sounds, made from around 3 months-1 year, after the age of 6-8 months, ability begins to decline. Young infants can distinguish among all 869 phonemes that have been identified across world"s languages: infants begin to (cid:498)specialize(cid:499) in the language they"re exposed to as neurons.