Key Terms
What is the term for the smallest unit of speech?
Phoneme
Werker and Desjardins
True or False: Adults had the most difficulty with the retroflex-dental distinction.
True
The ability of the brain (particularly in infants and young children) to adapt and change in response to experiences and injuries is known as what?
Neural plasticity
What is the term for the period of development in which language acquisition must occur (according to Lenneberg)?
Critical Period / Sensitive Window
True or False: Each member of the experiment (excluding the individual being studied) wore headphones during the experiment to prevent any confounding variables from affecting the results.
True
What was the age range that the researchers identified as the period in which the ability to discriminate between the phonemes was the strongest?
6-8 months
What is the term for the way our senses adjust to different stimuli after prolonged exposure to them?
Sensory Adaptation/Habituation
Three different types of consonants were talked about/studied in this research - the dental consonant, the alveolar consonant, and what was the third type of consonant?
Retroflex consonant
What was the name of the task the researchers used in which the infant was conditioned to turn their head toward the sound source when they detect a change in phonemic category?
Conditioned head turn task
Did the key findings in this research support or reject the hypotheses of previous researchers?
Support
The infants in this research were trained to turn their head to certain phoneme changes by what operant conditioning technique?
Reinforcement
Fill in the blanks: Adults perceive the speech sounds of a ______________________ language based on similarities and difference with their ___________________ language.
Non-native, native
True or False: The researchers used negative reinforcement strategies to train the infants to turn their head at the sound of phonemic changes.
False
True or False: Regardless of the type of consonant-distinction, training consistently helped the adults perform better on identifying the changes.
False
Which aspect of Baddeley's Working Memory Model describes an auditory store that is designed to temporarily hold verbal information?
What does the acronym "PAM" stand for in this article?
Perceptual Assimilation Model
In this type of procedure used by the researchers, the subjects monitored a continuous background of syllables from one phonemic category and were tasked with identifying when the stimuli changed to a different phonemic category.
Category change procedure
Later research conducted by Polka and Werker found that experience begins to influence language capabilities at an earlier age for vowels or consonants?
Vowels
Neuron ___________ is the increase in new neurons due to cell growth, while neuron ___________ is the process in which the brain eliminates extra neurons that aren't used.
Proliferation, pruning