Abstract
One of the great overlooked tasks of language acquisition is how the language learner develops a representation of the sound properties of a word that allows for the recognition of words in fluent speech. Thus, while child phonologists have given a great deal of attention to the nature of the representations that underlie the child’s earliest productions of speech (e.g. Ferguson, 1986; Macken, 1980; Menn, 1980; Vihman, 1978), and other child language specialists have focused on the structure of the child’s semantic categories, much less is known about what sort of representation of the sound structure of words permits their comprehension by the child (cf. Jusczyk, 1985). Yet, one could argue that learning the essential phonemic characteristics that distinguish between one name and another in one’s native language is at least as important as distinguishing the boundaries of potential referents for the names. Clearly, to be a fluent speaker-hearer of a language, one needs to develop the appropriate categories for both the sounds and the meanings of words.
Keywords
- Speech Perception
- Speech Sound
- Phonetic Feature
- Fluent Speech
- Sound Structure
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The research reported here was supported by a research grant to the author N.I.C.H.D. (#HD-15795). The author also whishes to thank Ranka Bijeljac- Babic, Josiane Bertoncini, Patricia Kuhl, Jacques Mehler, Joanne Miller, Deborah Kemler Nelson, Robert Remez and Janet Werker for comments they made on a previous version of this manuscript.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Jusczyk, P.W. (1987). Implications from Infant Speech Studies on the Unit of Perception. In: Schouten, M.E.H. (eds) The Psychophysics of Speech Perception. NATO ASI Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_35
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