PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT: PERCEPTION

There are several views on the extent to which a newly born infant is attuned to speech. An articulatory learning theory suggests that an infant has no perceptual capacity at birth and that the phonological system is entirely acquired through exposure to input. An attunement theory has it that the infant is born with the capacity to perceive certain fundamental sounds, which enables it to identify some of those which feature in the target language (TL). A strong nativist view (a universal theory) holds that the infant is endowed with the capacity to distinguish the speech sounds of all human languages but later loses it for sounds which are not relevant to the TL. Finally, a maturational nativist view envisages a biologically determined programme for both perception and production.

Not enough is known about the precise relationship between perception and production in phonological development. It may be that problems in distinguishing certain sounds influence the order in which phonemes are acquired. For example, in English /f/ and /r/ appear late, and one possible explanation is that they are easily confused with / θ / and /w/. The cause does not lie in the infant’s hearing, which is fully developed at this point; rather, its brain may not yet be able to process these distinctions.

An insight into the relation between perception and production is provided by the fis phenomenon. Assume that a child pronounces the adult word FISH as [fIs]. If an adult imitates the child’s pronunciation, the child can recognise that it is wrong but cannot put it right. This does not necessarily show that the child has a precise representation in its mind of the adult form; but it does show that it has a representation that is distinct from the form that it produces. Hence a suggestion that the infant might possess two distinct lexicons: one for perception and one for production. In its current form, this theory assumes that there is actually a single lexicon (containing elements of word meaning) but that it has separate phonological registers for input and output.

 Many studies have shown that the development of auditory perception begins much earlier than might be supposed. Important research areas include:

Categorical perception. Experimenters have demonstrated that infants as young as four months distinguish stops by means of sharply defined boundaries and can also distinguish vowels and liquids. However, the infants do not appear to recognise category boundaries for fricatives. This finding may be significant, as, across languages, fricatives tend to emerge late.

Critical period. The issue here is whether there is a critical period during which infants are particularly sensitive to the phonology of their target language. It appears that infants can distinguish between sounds which are not contrastive in the language they are acquiring, whereas most adults cannot. Initial evidence suggested that infants lost the ability to make these distinctions as early as nine months. However, later findings have indicated that children of four years old can still make certain ‘robust’ non-native distinctions, and that adults remain capable of distinguishing sounds which are entirely absent in the native language (e.g. for English-speakers, different Xhosa clicks). Discriminatory ability may thus be lost to different degrees, reflecting the extent to which L2 phonemes are distinct from those in the first language.

Jusczyk’s WRAPSA model offers an account based upon focus of attention rather than complete loss of discriminatory ability. It suggests that we continue to perceive all the contrasts in the signal but that certain features are given special ‘weighting’. Our perception of sounds does not change but the way we distribute our attention is determined by the language we acquire.

Phoneme awareness. Children find it difficult to distinguish minimal pairs (MEND / SEND, ROAD/ WROTE) before about twoyears six months. This suggests that early words are represented holistically rather than in terms of the phonemes that constitute them. It is unclear exactly when the child develops an awareness of phonemes. One view is that we only come to recognise phonemic segments as a result of learning to read alphabetically. Another theory is that perception vocabulary remains holistic for a while but that production vocabulary is specified in terms of phonemes and/or the articulatory gestures associated with them.

Rhythm. Infants appear to pick up the rhythm patterns of their mother’s speech even while in the womb. The child then may exploit rhythmic properties of the speech signal in order to locate word boundaries in connected speech. English-acquiring infants develop an awareness of the SW (strong-weak) pattern which characterises much of the English lexicon and may use it as the basis for identifying potential words.

Syllable. It may also be that a unit of phonological processing is available to the infant, the best candidate being the syllable. Infants display sensitivity to syllable structure at a very early age– probably as a result of noticing the steady-state sequences in the speech stream which correspond to the vowels at the centre of each syllable.

Normalisation. The adult voices to which the infant is exposed vary greatly in pitch, speech rate, accent etc. Studies have tested the infant’s capacity to compensate for these features when extracting phonological information. Once a given phoneme distinction has been achieved, infants show that they are able to sustain it even when the phonemes are uttered by different voices. Infants also appear capable of making the distinction between /b ɑ / and /w ɑ / which, for adults, depends upon assessing the speech rate of the talker.

See also: Bootstrapping, Categorical perception, Critical period

Further reading: Goodman and Nusbaum (1994); Ingram (1989: 83–115, 179–219); Jusczyk (1997); Morgan and Demuth (1996); Tomasello and Bates (2001: 1–56)

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

شعبة الخطابة الحسينية النسوية تستأنف برامج رابطة خطيبات المنبر الحسيني

شعبة فاطمة بنت أسد تحتفي بتخرج الدفعة الثانية من طالبات المدرسة القرآنية

مع انطلاق العام الدراسي.. العتبة العباسية المقدسة تطّلع على سير العملية التعليمية في مجموعة العميد التربوية

بأربع أوراق بحثية.. قسم الشؤون الفكرية يشارك في المؤتمر العلمي الدولي الرابع عشر بالعتبة الكاظمية

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

كيف يمكن لحفنة من الجوز أن تؤثر على نومك وتركيزك؟

دراسة: كوب ميلك شيك واحد قد يكون "قنبلة دماغية"

هل يعد "الباراسيتامول" خيارا آمنا للنساء الحوامل؟

دراسة تكشف الرابط بين العلاقات العاطفية والرضا عن الحياة

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

كارثة صامتة.. "الهواء الملوث" يسرق نور عيون الأطفال

دراسة: رصد أول دليل على وجود "إشعاع هوكينغ"

رسالة بلغة لا تعرفها؟.. "واتساب" يترجمها لك فورا

"إنستغرام".. ميزة جديدة لكشف "الكذب في العمر"

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

PHONOTACTIC RULES

PHONOLOGICALWORKING MEMORY

PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION

PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT: PRODUCTION

PHONOLOGICAL BIAS TECHNIQUE

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

PERCEPTUAL MAGNET EFFECT

PERCEPTION

PAUSING

PATTERN RECOGNITION (also PATTERN MATCHING)

PARAPHASIA

PARALLEL PROCESSING