Download Native Language Preferences and Infant Development: Prosodic and Phonetic Information and more Quizzes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! TERM 1 native language preferences DEFINITION 1 - infants at a young age listen to their native language preferentially- most infants are raised in bilingual householdsMehler: 2 month olds- French infants listen longer to French than Russian but no longer to English than Italian- American infants listen longer to English than Italian, but no longer French than RussanMoon, Cooper and Fifershowed similar patterns in 2 day olds* listening longer to the language that is native to them (it wasn't that one was more interesting than the other)* born with native language preference TERM 2 native language preferences implications DEFINITION 2 results from the studies imply that infants can discriminate the languages before they understand them TERM 3 Possibility 1 DEFINITION 3 Prosodic (intonational) information- driven by intonational, melodic and prosodic patterns of the language (not phonological sounds structures)- infants come into this preference from prenatal experience uteran wall only allows low frequency info to pass which is the melodic contours of a language - evidence: infants show the same preferences when speech is low-pass-filtered low pass filter --> only allows the low frequencies though TERM 4 possibility 2 DEFINITION 4 Phonetic information- Dutch and English have very similar prosody but different phonology- Juscyzk study: American infants preferred English words and Dutch infants preferred Dutch words (didn't show this pattern until 9 months of age) first infants are more universal listeners at 6 months and around 9 months can distinguish their language based on phonemes (they are becoming more native listeners) show prosody preferences before phonology preferences distinguishing based on phonology requires learning phonology first TERM 5 discriminating among other languages DEFINITION 5 what if neither is THE native language? --> bilingual homelanguages fall into different rhythm classes- stress timed, syllable timed, mora times TERM 6 stress-timed DEFINITION 6 ex: English, Dutch- spend more time on stressed syllable compared to unstressed syllables- these types of rhythmic distinctions are very noticeable- draw out some sounds and squeeze in others TERM 7 stress-timed DEFINITION 7 ex: French, Brazilian, Porteguese- each syllable takes the same amount of time to be produced TERM 8 Mora-timed DEFINITION 8 Ex: Japanese- some syllables get twice the weight as others- every syllable in Japanese is 1 mora or 2 mora- each unit (mora) takes up the same amount of time TERM 9 rhythm class DEFINITION 9 - in syllable timing, each syllable takes similar amount of time to be produced- in stress-timing, rhythm is based on stressed syllables only; unstressed syllables tend to be compressedex:in stress-timed language (english): "approximately" takes the same amount of time to be produced as the 1-syllable "old"- in syllable- timed language, "approximately" would take 5x as long to produce as "old" TERM 10 infants and rhythm class DEFINITION 10 - this aspect of rhythm may be easy to hear, such that infants can distinguish languages from different rhythm classes before they can distinguish languages in the same class* infants show preference for their native language not their native rhythm pattern French infants learning a syllable timed language don't show a preference for all syllable timed languages (only French) * if you test whether they can make a distinction - they can distinguish languages that fall into different rhythmic classes before they candistinguish languages that fall into the same* non-human primates can distinguish languages that fall into different rhythmic classes (not the same)
