Question 1

Which of the following words can be characterized as having a voiced word onset?

Accepted Answer

A voiced word onset is when the vocal folds vibrate when producing the initial sound of a word. In this case, the initial sound of "baby" is the voiced consonant /b/. The other answer choices have voiceless consonants (/p/ in "pall" and "stop" and /f/ in "fate") at the beginning.

Question 2

The phonemic restoration effect suggests that humans

Accepted Answer

The phonemic restoration effect refers to the phenomenon where listeners are able to understand degraded speech if most of the utterance remains intact. This is possible because humans have the ability to fill in missing phonemes based on contextual information and their knowledge of the language. Option A is incorrect because humans do not have an unlimited phonemic inventory. Option B is also incorrect as humans are able to process multiple stimuli at the same time. Option C is incorrect because the phonemic restoration effect shows that listeners can understand degraded speech even if some part of the utterance is missing.

Question 3

While Japanese speakers consider the relation between /r/ and /l/ to be fluid and thus_______, English speakers treat the two as distinct _______.

Accepted Answer

The fact that Japanese speakers consider the relation between /r/ and /l/ to be fluid suggests that these sounds are allophonic in Japanese, meaning that they are perceived as variations of the same phoneme. In contrast, English speakers treat /r/ and /l/ as distinct phonemes, which means that they are contrastive and can change the meaning of a word (e.g. rat vs. lat). Therefore, the best choice is B, which correctly contrasts allophones and phonemes as relevant concepts in explaining the distinction between Japanese and English sound systems.

Question 4

Extrapolating from the general principles that motivate the technique used in Eimas et al.'s 1971 study, how would you expect your 1-week-old sister to respond to being shown a new toy she has never seen before?

Accepted Answer

Eimas et al.'s 1971 study is based on the principle of habituation and dishabituation in infants, indicating that infants show increased interest or attention to new stimuli by changing their sucking patterns. In this context, a new toy would be a novel stimulus, likely causing an increase in sucking vigor as a sign of heightened interest or attention.

Question 5

At what age do babies begin to sort their inventory of sounds based on the separate phonemic categories of the language they are learning?

Accepted Answer

By the end of their first year, babies start to specialize in the phonemic categories of their native language, tuning out non-native sounds.

Question 6

Which sound pair represents the concept of complementary distribution of allophones?

Accepted Answer

The first sounds in "colt" [kʰ] and "kip" [k] are in complementary distribution because they occur in different phonetic environments and do not contrast with each other in English.

Question 7

In French, nasalization of vowels indicates _______, whereas in English, the same vowel nasalization indicates _______.

Accepted Answer

In French, nasalization of vowels creates distinct perceptual boundaries between phonemes, whereas in English, the same vowel nasalization indicates minimal boundaries between allophones. This means that in French, a nasal vowel (such as /ã/ or /ɔ̃/) is a completely different phoneme than a non-nasal vowel (such as /a/ or /ɔ/), and changing the nasality of the vowel can change the meaning of a word. In English, on the other hand, nasalization of vowels is largely predictable and does not result in a change in meaning, but rather in a change in the phonetic realization of a vowel phoneme (such as the difference between the vowel in "hat" and "hand").

Question 8

Based on White et al.'s 2008 study, you would predict that the 8.5-month-old baby of English-speaking parents would

Accepted Answer

White et al.'s 2008 study suggests that infants use the distributional properties of sounds in their ambient language to learn phonemic categories. The fact that [t] and [tʃ] (represented here as [t^h]) are in complementary distribution would be used by an 8.5-month-old baby to infer that they are allophones of the same phoneme in English.

Question 9

Phonetic assimilation occurs

Accepted Answer

Phonetics assimilation occurs when sounds are affected in their pronunciation by other sounds that are adjacent to them, resulting in a change in the phonetic quality of the sound. This can happen in various ways, including voicing assimilation, nasal assimilation, and place assimilation. It does not involve the creation of new phonemes or allophones, as in option A and B, and is not related to the adoption of foreign words, as in option D.

Question 10

The most natural grouping of phonemes is

Accepted Answer

Phonemes are typically grouped based on their manner and place of articulation. Both "f" and "s" are fricatives, meaning they are produced by forcing air through a narrow opening in the mouth. They also both involve the front of the mouth, with "f" being a labiodental sound (made with the lips and teeth) and "s" being an alveolar sound (made with the tongue and the roof of the mouth behind the front teeth). Therefore, "f" and "s" are a natural grouping of phonemes.

Question 11

Saffran and Thiessen's 2003 study on pattern induction by infant language learners helped demonstrate that

Accepted Answer

Saffran and Thiessen's study demonstrated evidence for learning biases in favor of natural patterns of language. The infants were able to learn statistical regularities in speech sounds that reflect natural patterns of language, suggesting that they have an innate bias towards these patterns.

Question 12

The different pronunciation of the plural marker -s? ?in the words dogs and cats illustrates which type of sound pattern?

Accepted Answer

The pronunciation of the plural marker -s in "dogs" and "cats" varies depending on the final sound of the word it attaches to, illustrating assimilation, where one feature of a sound (in this case, voicing) affects the same feature of the neighboring sound (the plural marker becomes voiced or voiceless to match the preceding sound).

Question 13

Dupoux et al.'s 1999 research showed that native speakers of a certain language insert illusory sounds to change syllable sequences that are "illegal" in their language to a legal sequence. These findings illustrate the power of

Accepted Answer

Dupoux et al.'s research showed that native speakers insert illusory sounds to change syllable sequences that are "illegal" in their language to a legal sequence. This demonstrates the power of phonotactic expectations, which are the set of rules governing how sounds can be combined to form syllables and words in a particular language. The speakers' brains are anticipating the sounds that should occur in a certain context, and when they do not hear them, their brains insert an illusory sound to make the sequence conform to the expected phonotactic pattern.

Question 14

Refer to the graph to answer this question.
 This graph illustrates sensitivity to the sonority sequencing principle in different languages. These findings suggest that

Accepted Answer

The answer of Refer to the graph to answer this...

Question 15

How do researchers use head-turning behavior to identify differences in babies' perception of familiar and novel words?

Accepted Answer

The answer of How do researchers use head-turning behavior to...

Question 16

Discuss how Jusczyk and Aslin's 1995 methodology allowed them to investigate infants' abilities to perceive word breaks in sentences. Do the results indicate that infants have this capability? Explain.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Discuss how Jusczyk and Aslin's 1995 methodology...

Question 17

Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) found that babies as young as 6 months of age could not segment words in sentences, whereas Bortfeld (2005) found that they could. How would you account for this difference?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) found that babies...

Question 18

Illustrate how Saffran et al.'s 1996 experiments demonstrated that 8-month-olds can segment completely novel speech that does not contain any clues such as intonation or phonotactic information.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Illustrate how Saffran et al.'s 1996 experiments...

Question 19

Refer to the figure.
  Based on the results in the table, what can you conclude about the ability of an 8-month-old to detect words presented to him during the familiarization phase?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Refer to the figure.
  Based on...

Question 20

Refer to the figure.
  Hauser et al. (2001) conducted an experiment with tamarin monkeys that was very similar to Saffran et al.'s 1996 study investigating transitional probabilities. They found that after listening to a 20-minute stream of words from the same artificial language studied by Saffran et al., the tamarins oriented to a speaker more often when it played sequences of syllables that straddled a word boundary than when it played a sequence of syllables that made up a complete word. Compare this finding to the results reported by Saffran et al. (see Figure 4.2). What do these results suggest about the use of statistical cues for segmenting words?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Refer to the figure.
  Hauser et...

Quiz 3: Learning Sound Patterns