PSYCH 150 Lecture Notes - Voice-Onset Time, International Phonetic Alphabet, Unimodality
Document Summary
Categorical perception: categorical perception occurs when a range of stimuli that differ continuously are perceived as belonging to only a few categories, with no degrees of difference within a given category. Maintenance and loss theory: use it or lose it infants maintain contrasts being used in their language and lose all the others. Functional reorganization theory: unconscious filter imposed when sounds are processed as language. Data distributions determine what the boundaries are in the filter. Identify phonemes (contrastive sounds that signal a change in meaning) Kids of the world require knowledge of phonemes before they can figure out what different words are - and when different meanings are signaled by different words. The words sound the same but spelled and mean something different. Languages draw from a common set of sounds (which can be represented by the. International phonetic alphabet (ipa)), but only use a subset of that common set.
