User:Ornelasj/sandbox


 * At 10 months, infants begin to lose their ability to discriminate sounds from non-native languages when those sounds do not represent a discernible contrast (also known as a separate phoneme) in their native language.
 * This loss of infants' ability to detect phonemic contrasts in other language is apparent when we look at the following phonemes from the perspective of a Japanese speaker: /ɹ/ and /l/. In English, /ɹ/ is a separate phoneme from /l/. This is exemplified in the words 'rake' and 'lake.' An English speaker would not use /ɹ/ and /l/ interchangeably because in English, this would create two different words with two different meanings. To a Japanese speaker, however, these words would not sound critically different, as these sounds are not separate phonemes in Japanese.
 * Janet Werker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, conducted an experiment in 1984 which shows this change in an infant's ability to discern the phonemic contrasts of any language. Before this change occurs, all contrasts are "critically different" to all infants. That is to say, an infant (learning any spoken language in the world) is able to perceive the difference between an /ɹ/ or an /l/, as well as he or she is able to note the difference between /p/ and /ph/ (aspirated /p/) and categorizes these sounds as contrasting. Patricia Kuhl, noting this ability in infants to identify these contrasts, named them "citizens of the world" because they seemed to be born with the power to learn any and all given phonemes as separate. Which meant, as Kuhl noted, they were born with the capability to learn any language in the world entire.
 * Although this new ability presents itself as a loss of phonemic specification (i.e., the inability to discriminate between sounds of a non-native language may appear to be a step backward in learning), it is actually helping infants to zero in on the sounds of their own language, while preventing them from overextending this specification. If infants did not learn to ignore the differences that are irrelevant in their native language, they would have to hold a space in their lexicon for the sound /p/, in any given word, as well as a space for the other sounds /p/ (e.g., /p/ at the beginning of a word, /p/ at the end of a word, /p/ between two consonants, etc.). Not only would this put strain on the infant's memory, but it would be an unnecessary distinction to make (unless, of course, each of those categories of /p/ are contrastive in the infant's native language) . In English, for instance, /p/ becomes aspirated at the beginning of a word, but English speakers do not note this /p/ as a contrastive sound. That is, if a native English speaker heard a person start the word, 'pat' with an unaspirated /p/, he or she would not hear this as a separate word with a separate meaning; although they may notice this difference, they would instead hear one of the many types of /p/ that would be considered in their lexicon under the general category, /p/. However, if they had a separate category in their lexicon for each type of /p/ sound, extra time would have to be taken in order to find exactly the right /p/, which would still lead him or her to the conclusion that the word uttered was 'pat,' but would take longer and require more space in his or her memory.


 * At this time, infants also learn to recognize sequences of the same consonants and vowels as the same words, regardless of who the sequences come from or what their patterns of intonation are. That is, they learn that a speaker's vocal tendencies are not a part of what gives a word a specific meaning . With this ability at hand, infants are able to ignore these differences, and they begin to learn how to hone in on word meaning, then subsequently, sentence meaning and the grammar of their language.