Abstract

INFANTS LEARNING PHONOTACTIC PATTERNS

Iman Jebur Janam

Volume: 9 Issue: 3 2019

Abstract:

The phonemes of any language do not combine freely in a random way. There are constraints of different types on the combination of the phonemes within a word. So, this study is an attempt to investigate the acceptable combination of phonemes since if these phonemes are combined in a wrong way, this wrong combination will affect on the meaning of the word and then the meaning of the whole sentence as well and which will, as a result, lead to ambiguity. This study aims at stating the main types of phonotactics and presenting a detailed account of phonotactic patterns and how infants learn them. It is hypothesized that phonotactics plays an important role in how infants learn the correct combination of phonemes and that those infants develop knowledge of phonotactics from continuous speech by segmenting the speech. Two sets of phoneme sequences are presented for the infants and the results can be summed up as follows: there is variation between the two types of stimuli (ABA) and (AAB). Infants have showed high variation between these two patterns. Some infants have showed preference for (AAB) and others for (ABA) pattern. So, infants learn phonotactics before they start learning lexicon and that they show preferences for certain combinations of phonemes.

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