Is Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns Constrained by Phonological Features?

Alejandrina Cristià · Amanda H. Seidl

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Language Development and Disorders Phonetics and Phonology Research Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

Phonological patterns in languages often involve groups of sounds rather than individual sounds, which may be explained if phonology operates on the abstract features shared by those groups (CitationTroubetzkoy, 1939/1969; CitationChomsky & Halle, 1968). Such abstract features may be present in the developing grammar either because they are part of a Universal Grammar included in the genetic endowment of humans (e.g., CitationHale, Kissock and Reiss, 2006), or plausibly because infants induce features from their linguistic experience (e.g., CitationMielke, 2004). A first experiment tested 7-month-old infants' learning of an artificial grammar pattern involving either a set of sounds defined by a phonological feature, or a set of sounds that cannot be described with a single feature—an “arbitrary” set. Infants were able to induce the constraint and generalize it to a novel sound only for the set that shared the phonological feature. A second study showed that infants' inability to learn the arbitrary grouping was not due to their inability to encode a constraint on some of the sounds involved.

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References

1968The Sound Pattern of English 1984Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life 1955An Analysis of Perceptual Confusions Among Some English Consonants 1985Advances in infancy research 1953Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. By Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar M. Fant, and Morris Halle. (Technical report No. 13, 2d printing with additions and corrections.) Pp. viii, 58. [Cambridge, Mass.]: Acoustics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1952.1995Infants′ Detection of the Sound Patterns of Words in Fluent Speech 2004Evolutionary Phonology 1994Infants′ Sensitivity to Phonotactic Patterns in the Native Language

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2011Effects of the distribution of acoustic cues on infants' perception of sibilants 2014Object labeling influences infant phonetic learning and generalization 2012Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning 2009Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns 2011

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