The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (original) (raw)
Related papers
Possible phonological cues in categorial acquisition: Evidence from adult categorization
Studies in Language, 2008
This paper reports an experiment in which adult native speakers of Dutch were asked to categorize nonce stems. These were presented without any morphological or other information about their potential class-membership. We expected that subjects would be able to categorize these words solely on the basis of phonological information. Nouns in Dutch have a richer possible syllable-structure than verbs (Trommelen 1989) and therefore, we expected that stimuli with a ‘nominal’ syllable make-up could be identified by the subjects as nouns where the other stimuli were ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results show that this is indeed the case, adding to the evidence that native speakers of a language are able to use phonological information to categorize the words of their language.
Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence
Developmental Psychology, 2018
The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well-defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be responsible for such development using a visual world paradigm experiment based on (McMurray, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002). Children from three age groups (7-8, 12-13, and 17-18 years) heard a token from either a b/p or s/ʃ continua spanning two words (beach/peach, ship/sip), and selected its referent from a screen containing four pictures of potential lexical candidates. Eye-movements to each object were monitored as a measure of how strongly children were committing to each candidate as perception unfolds in real-time. Results showed an ongoing sharpening of speech categories through 18, which was particularly apparent during the early stages of real-time perception. When analysis targeted to specifically within-category sensitivity to continuous detail, children exhibited increasingly gradient categories over development, suggesting that increasing sensitivity to finegrained detail in the signal enables these more discrete categorization. Together these suggest that speech development is a protracted process in which children's increasing sensitivity to withincategory detail in the signal enables increasingly sharp phonetic categories.
Newborn categorization of vowel-like sounds
Developmental Science, 2001
While there are many theories of the development of speech perception, there are few data on speech perception in human newborns. This paper examines the manner in which newborns responded to a set of stimuli that define one surface of the adult vowel space. Experiment 1 used a preferential listeningahabituation paradigm to discover how newborns divide that vowel space. Results indicated that there were zones of high preference flanked by zones of low preference. The zones of high preference approximately corresponded to areas where adults readily identify vowels. Experiment 2 presented newborns with pairs of vowels from the zones found in Experiment 1. One member of each pair was the most preferred vowel from a zone, and the other member was the least preferred vowel from the adjacent zone of low preference. The pattern of preference was preserved in Experiment 2. However, a comparison of Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that habituation had occurred in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that the habituation seen in Experiment 1 was due to processes of categorization, by using a familiarization preference paradigm. The results supported the hypothesis that newborns categorized the vowel space in an adult-like manner, with vowels perceived as relatively good or poor exemplars of a vowel category.
Categorical Perception of Consonants: The Interaction of Learning and
1999
Five decades of research in speech perception and phonetics have been based primarily on a single experimental paradigm. In this paradigm, the participant hears a speech sound (or series of speech sounds) and must report the stimulus as belonging to one of a set of possible response categories. This research has been
The categorical perception of consonants: The interaction of learning and processing
1999
Five decades of research in speech perception and phonetics have been based primarily on a single experimental paradigm. In this paradigm, the participant hears a speech sound (or series of speech sounds) and must report the stimulus as belonging to one of a set of possible response categories. This research has been guided by the basic principle stated in (1):
Categorization of speech by infants: Support for speech-sound prototypes
Developmental Psychology, 1989
This study tested 6-month-old infants' categorization of speech stimuli to investigate whether infants organize speech categories around "prototypes." In Experiment 1, infants first discriminated single "good" exemplars from two different vowel categories. They were then tested with 64 novel exemplars, 32 from each vowel category. The test stimuli varied in the degree to which they conformed to adult-defined prototypes of the two categories. The results showed that infants correctly sorted the novel stimuli over 90% of the time. In Experiment 2, we trained two groups of infants, one with a good (prototypical) exemplar from a vowel category and the other with a poor (nonprototypical) exemplar. Then we tested both groups with 16 novel exemplars from that same vowel category. Generalization to novel members of the category was significantly greater following exposure to the prototypical exemplar. Results are consistent with a model of speech perception that holds that young human infants organize vowel categories around prototypes. This may contribute to their seemingly efficient processing of speech information, even in the first half year of life.
Stimulus variability and perceptual learning of nonnative vowel categories
Applied …, 2013
English-speakers' learning of a French vowel contrast (/ə/-/ø/) was examined under six different stimulus conditions in which contrastive and noncontrastive stimulus dimensions were varied orthogonally to each other. The distribution of contrastive cues was varied across training conditions to create single prototype, variable far (from the category boundary), and variable close (to the boundary) conditions, each in a single talker or a multiple talker version. The control condition involved identification of gender appropriate grammatical elements. Pre-and posttraining measures of vowel perception and production were obtained from each participant. When assessing pre-to posttraining changes in the slope of the identification functions, statistically significant training effects were observed in the multiple voice far and multiple voice close conditions.
Child Development, 2000
In this paper, we draw on recent developments in several areas of cognitive science that suggest that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several different levels of representation. Evidence comes from many sources, including recent studies on language processing in adults and on language acquisition in children. Phonological behavior is inßuenced very early by pattern frequency in the lexicon of the ambient language, and we propose that phonological acquisition might provide the initial bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. The phonological categories over which pattern frequencies are calculated, however, are neither transparently available in the audiovisual signal nor deterministically Þxed by the physiological and perceptual capacities of the species. Therefore, we need several age-appropriate models of how the lexicon can inßuence a childÕs interactions with the ambient language over the course of phonological acquisition.