LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Categorical Perception, Voice-Onset Time, Vocal Folds

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Jon Gajewski

Document Summary

The logical problem of language acquisition tends to lead to a debate between two positions, both of which provide a solution to the problem: Step 1: let"s look at what needs to be learned. Sounds form a continuum and children must learn how to break it into categories. Even though vot is a continuum, we perceive it as two categories: d and t. We can show this by creating pairs of sounds that differ by the same vot, for example, 20ms. Just like voicing is continuous because time is continuous, place of articulation is continuous because physical space is continuous. Just like voicing, children learning language must learn to break the continuum into categories. In english, children learn to make no distinction between alveolar and retroflex places of articulation. For example, every voiced stop in this region is perceived as d In hindi, children learn to make a distinction between alveolar and retroflex places of articulation.