JLP315 – Lecture 2: Learning Sounds I

Vocabulary flashcards covering major terms and concepts from Lecture 2 on infant sound learning, including theoretical views, developmental stages, experimental methods, and phonological principles.

Language Acquisition

The process by which humans learn to perceive, produce, and understand language, guided by both biological predispositions and environmental input.

Nativist View

Theory that humans possess innate, language-specific knowledge and a biologically determined capacity (domain specificity) for acquiring language.

Anti-nativist View

Theory that language learning draws on general cognitive abilities (domain generality) rather than a specialized, innate language module.

Hockett’s Design Features

Sixteen properties that characterize human language (e.g., arbitrariness, displacement, productivity, duality of patterning).

Critical Period Hypothesis

Proposal that language must be acquired within a biologically limited time window (childhood) for full proficiency to develop.

Phonology

The study of how sounds are organized in a language, including which sounds (phonemes) occur and how they may combine.

Phoneme

The smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language (e.g., /m/, /t/), whose substitution changes word meaning.

Phonotactic Constraints

Language-specific rules governing permissible sequences of sounds (e.g., English disallows /mlg/ at word onset).

Morphology

The study of how sounds form meaningful units (morphemes) and how those units combine within words.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language; may be free (cat) or bound (-ing).

Lexicon

A speaker’s mental dictionary containing word meanings, pronunciations, and grammatical properties.

Syntax

The set of rules governing how words combine into phrases and sentences.

Phonological Knowledge

A speaker’s implicit understanding of their language’s sound inventory, permissible combinations, and phoneme contrasts.

Accidental Gap

A sound sequence that obeys a language’s phonotactic rules yet happens not to form an actual word (e.g., ‘glim’ in English).

Minimal Pair

Two words differing by only one phoneme, demonstrating that the differing sounds are contrastive (e.g., mat vs. rat).

Categorical Perception

The phenomenon in which continuous acoustic variations are perceived as belonging to discrete sound categories (phonemes).

Voice Onset Time (VOT)

The interval between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal-cord vibration; distinguishes voiced vs. voiceless stops.

Habituation Procedure

Experimental method where infants’ decreased attention to repeated stimuli and renewed interest to new stimuli reveal perceptual discrimination.

High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) Paradigm

Infant study technique measuring changes in sucking rate to infer attention and detect discrimination of auditory stimuli.

Head-Turn Preference Procedure (HPP)

Method in which infants’ head-turn duration toward sound sources indexes interest or recognition, used to test speech perception.

Reflexive Vocalizations

Birth–2 mo stage sounds such as cries and coughs produced involuntarily with engaged vocal folds.

Cooing

Comfort-state vowel-like sounds (2–4 mo) produced from the back of the mouth; often accompanied by laughter.

Vocal Play

4–6 mo stage involving exploration of pitch, loudness, raspberries, and early consonant-vowel combinations.

Canonical Babbling

From ~6 mo, production of adult-like consonant-vowel syllables; includes reduplicated (e.g., bababa) and variegated (e.g., bagidabu) forms.

Reduplicated Babbling

Canonical babble consisting of identical CV syllables repeated in sequence (e.g., dada).

Variegated Babbling

Canonical babble with varying consonants and vowels across syllables (e.g., bagidabu), more common after 12 mo.

Conversational Babble (Jargon)

10 mo+ stage with babbled strings exhibiting adult-like stress and intonation patterns, overlapping with first words.

Babbling Drift

Gradual influence of ambient language on babble characteristics, noticeable around 6 months.

Perceptual Narrowing

Developmental reduction in sensitivity to non-native phoneme contrasts as infants tune to their native language during the first year.

Native vs. Non-native Phoneme Discrimination

Infant ability to distinguish sound contrasts of their own language more accurately than those from unfamiliar languages, emerging by ~10–12 mo.

Prosodic Patterns

Rhythmic and intonational characteristics (melody contours) that help infants differentiate languages and segment speech.

Statistical Learning (in Speech)

Infants’ tracking of transitional probabilities between sounds to locate word and phrase boundaries.

Use-It-or-Lose-It Principle

Concept that continued exposure maintains perceptual abilities (e.g., phoneme discrimination), whereas lack of exposure leads to decline.

Duality of Patterning

Design feature whereby meaningless sounds combine to form meaningful words, allowing vast vocabularies from limited phonemes.

Productivity (Design Feature)

Capacity of language users to create and understand novel utterances that have never been heard before.