Phonological Organization + Development
What is the difference between phonetics and phonology?
Phonetics is the study of the speech sounds themselves, while phonology is the study of the ways in which those sounds may be used in combination to forms words.
Add a prefix to the word “read”.
reread
Which of the following is an example of context-bound word use?
a. A child uses the word “bunny” to refer to their pet rabbit, but not to squirrels in the yard.
b. A child uses the word “bunny” to refer to their pet rabbit, but uses the word “rabbit to refer to all other rabbits.
c. A child uses the word “bunny” to refer to their pet rabbit, their pet cat, and even their pet fish.
d. A child uses the word “bunny” to refer all small fluffy animals.
b. A child uses the word “bunny” to refer to their pet rabbit, but uses the word “rabbit to refer to all other rabbits.
Mature competent speakers can draw on a variety of cues to help them figure out the meaning of a novel word. Which of the following cues or combination of cues was found in Gillette et al. (1999) to be the most useful in figuring out the meaning of a “mystery” word?
a. cross-situational observation only
b. noun co-occurrence only
c. syntactic frame only
c. syntactic frame only
14. In the word kæts “cats”, /k/ is a
a. phoneme
b. morpheme
c. word
d. all of the above
e. a and b only
a. phoneme
What is a cohort?
A set of words that share features (e.g., all words that start with “lea-“).
What is the whole object assumption?
The assumption that a new word labels an entire object, not a part of it or a quality about it.
Is it more common to guess a word referent pairing on the first exposure to the word or the second exposure?
Second
True or False: In English, /s/ and /z/ are phonemic when used to signal “plural” meaning.
True. Whether you pronounce “cats” as /kæts/ or /kætz/, the meaning still references multiple cats.
Consider the word “unstoppable”. Separate the word into its component morphemes. For each affix you have separated out, identify whether it is: free or bound, derivational or inflectional.
un + stop + able
B,D F/B, D
What kinds of words do children tend to produce when they still only produce about 50 words overall?
Mostly common nouns and pronouns
According to Quine’s (1960) “problem of induction”, the difficulty of identifying a word’s referent in any single given context is that:
a. It can be difficult to see exactly what the speaker is looking at.
b. It can be difficult for children to follow the speaker’s gaze and therefore figure out what the speaker was talking about.
c. There are always an infinite number of possible referents for a word. (For example, in the scene above: teddy bear, stuffed animal, picnic, fun, outdoors, and so on.)
d. If you don’t speak the same language as the speaker, you can’t understand any of the other words in the sentence in order to help you figure out what that one word – FLURG – might be referring to.
c. There are always an infinite number of possible referents for a word. (For example, in the scene above: teddy bear, stuffed animal, picnic, fun, outdoors, and so on.)
In Werker et al. (2002) (covered in class), 20-month-old English-learning infants looked longer at a picture paired with the sound /dI/ (“dih”) if previously they had seen that same picture repeatedly paired with the sound /bI/ (“bih”). The authors interpreted this result as indicating that
a. the infants treat /dI/ vs /bI/ as a minimal pair.
b. the infants treat the difference in the sounds /b/ and /d/ as being in complementary distribution.
c. the infants are unable to hear the difference in the sounds /b/ and /d/.
d. all of the above
e. a and b only
a. the infants treat /dI/ vs /bI/ as a minimal pair.
Which of the following objects would a listener look at the least if they hear a speaker start to say “spri-”?
a. spring
b. sprinkler
c. spruce
d. spring
c. spruce
A child hears the word BLICK. Which of the following is an example of using mutual exclusivity?
a. The child assumes that the word BLICK refers to the horse’s harness because the child already knows that the animal itself is called a HORSE than therefore can’t also be a BLICK.
b. The child assumes that the child BLICK refers to the entire horse’s harness rather than to the part of it that goes in the horse’s mouth (which is called a “bit”, though the child didn’t know that either).
c. The child assumes that the word BLICK refers to the horse’s harness because she has heard the word BLICK used before to refer to the straps used on her booster seat.
d. The child later assumes the word BLICK refers to all animals.
a. The child assumes that the word BLICK refers to the horse’s harness because the child already knows that the animal itself is called a HORSE than therefore can’t also be a BLICK.
In Medina's study, why were the vignettes muted?
Infants learning their first words do not know the meanings of other words in the utterance and can't use them as context; by removing this information we more accurately model the earliest stages of acquisition.
Professor Medina’s daughter pronounced “spider” as “bider” /baɪdər/, “bister” /spaɪstər/, and “spider” /spaɪdər/. This demonstrates that:
a. she doesn’t know how to pronounce the word “spider”.
b. when she doesn’t pronounce the word correctly, she makes use of generalized phonological rules.
c. when she doesn’t pronounce the word correctly, she randomly drops or inserts sounds.
d. she believes that a spider has multiple, similar sounding names.
b. when she doesn’t pronounce the word correctly, she makes use of generalized phonological rules.
Although “smartness” is not actually an English word, you can understand what it means. Describe the morphological structure of “smartness”.
The base/stem/root is “smart”. Smart is a free, content morpheme that refers to intelligence. “-ness” is a suffix. “-ness” is a bound, function morpheme that doesn’t refer to anything, but changes the part of speech from an adjective to a noun.
In Harris et al.’s (1988) diary student, each of the four children’s first 10 words included some that were used in a context bound way and some that were used in a contextually flexible way. What does this tell us about children’s context-bound word use?
It tells us that it can’t be due to a cognitive limitation on the part of the child. If it was, then that particular child should use all of their words in a context-bound manner. Instead only some are context-bound, but clearly the children had the cognitive ability to also use words in a contextually flexible way.
Suppose a learner hears a novel word (such as “WUGGIES”) in two different situations. In the first situation, the learner believes it to refer to a pair of rain boots, but in the second situation, there is no rain boots around and the conversational context does not seem like it could have anything to do with boots of any kind. According to the statistical learning model of cross-situational word learning (Yu & Smith, 2007), the learner has an improved chance of now correctly guessing the word’s meaning the second time he hears it – even though he had guessed incorrectly the first time. Explain why.
According to the statistical learning model, learners keep track of the various possible meanings a word might have had in any given situation – and from one situation to the next, they start to notice a reoccurrence of the object the word must be referring to. So the first time the learner heard WUGGIES and thought it meant rain boots, he also stored some other possible meanings for WUGGIES based on the context, such as umbrella, jacket, wallet, keys, door, etc. The second time he hears WUGGIES, even though it doesn’t seem to mean rain boots, now he can compare all of the things that word could be referring to in the current situation with all of the the previous possible meaning to see if any of them match.