Phonology: From Sound to Mind (PDF)

Back to the Plurals sibilants A Final Note on Plurals — With which words is a child more likely to make a mistake in forming the plural? — cat or sheep — foot or ball — What is different about the words that children make errors with? What does this tell us about the knowledge they have? — Childr...

Back to the Plurals sibilants A Final Note on Plurals — With which words is a child more likely to make a mistake in forming the plural? — cat or sheep — foot or ball — What is different about the words that children make errors with? What does this tell us about the knowledge they have? — Children know the rule: they just over-extend it. Phonology: from sound to mind What we’ve seen from plurals is that certain sounds show up in predictable environments. Predicting where a sound shows up is related to our mental representation of the sound. Phonology: from sound to mind [khet] [sket] [get] ‘Kate’ ‘skate’ ‘gate’ English speakers consider the voiceless bolded sounds to be the same basic sound. We can’t predict when we’ll get sounds that speakers consider different. Another Example of Predictability An example: [s] - [ʃ] — Both English and Japanese have the sounds [s] and [ʃ] in their phonetic inventories — English: [slæʃ] slash — Japanese: [ʃimasu] do 16