[SOUND] We can use these sound patterns to develop some types of grammar. So think, for example, of the word permit and permit, right? So a permit is, of course, something that you use. If you're parking you put the permit, there, and you permit someone to come into the parking lot, but use a permit to make sure that you don't get a ticket when you're in the parking lot. So, again, notice that permit and permit are the same word, and the distinction between noun and verb has to do with where you put the emphasis. Whether it's on the first syllable or on the second syllable. And so this type of emphasis, sound emphasis is again, we can think of it as a building block for grammar. The importance of sound processing has been established for children worked on by Janet Werker and Patricia Kuhl, two well-known researchers in the field, have looked at what happens when we hear sound and how that sound ability develops. The idea being that newborns do have a bias towards their native language. But up until about five, six months of age, they can still hear the sounds of a language that they don't regularly encounter. So, for example, an infant who grows up in Japan and hears Japanese and does not hear the L-R distinction in the spoken input, would still be able to distinguish an L and an R up until about five, six months of age. At about eight months of age, that ability starts to disappear. Eight to ten months of age. Interestingly, Patricia Kuhl asks, well what happens if we try to reintroduce a sound that's no longer recognized? So she tried two different things. One was to stick infants in front of a TV and have them listen to basically TV in Chinese. Right, non-Chinese speaking infants. And then take another group and have them interact with a person who would play with them and speak to them in Chinese. And what she found was that even after a year of age, these toddlers now could recover the ability to recognize these Chinese sounds, suggesting that there's some plasticity. There is loss of the ability to pick up these sounds, but then there still seems to be the ability to relearn some of these sound contrasts. Some researchers have suggested, Morgan and Demuth in particular, that, sound serves to, as a, as a way to bootstrap, or to create or to build up, grammar. So, children, when you look at their speech, it's work done by LouAnn Gerken, she's looked at their speech, and then looked at what they produce. So for example, a child is much more likely to say something like doggy bites the book and much less likely to say something like doggy chases the book. Now you say well why is that? Well, just try to say that. Doggy bites the book. All right, it doesn't seem like a complicated, it just kind of rolls off the tongue. If you say dog, doggy chases the book, that requires you to stop at chases and then say the. Doggy bites the book, it just rolls right off. So the, it's not that, that can't be overcome and eventually children can say, doggy bites the book, right, doggy chases the book. The doggy chases the book. It's just that the very beginning of those sound pieces is quite simple. And it sort of flows in a certain way, and then over time, you build on top of that to create more complex types of sound. And this occurs in every language. We can take an example for an English speaker. It's quite difficult to learn, the gender-marked articles in Spanish. You know, so, you know, you can always hear an English speaker. I remember hearing my doctoral advisor, Elizabeth Bates, say, you know, is it this is Italian, so, she, she would ask her Italian colleagues, is it masculine or feminine? And they would say that's feminine. And she would say, it makes no sense to me, it's just not logical, why is, you know, why is in Spanish the moon feminine and the sun masculine? Well, interestingly, for little kids when they're learning Spanish, right, Spanish speaking kids, they actually create a trisyllabic break up, right? So it's three syllables which includes the article, el, la, and the noun, right? Which is usually two syllables. So you can have [FOREIGN], right? So you have this trisyllabic footprint. And little kids appear to be actually learning those as a chunk. So they don't learn [FOREIGN] the learn [FOREIGN], right, as one thing. Of course over time, they begin to realize that you can break those up and combine them, but they don't do this initially. So for them, the actual article with the gender, right, the el and la, is built right into the word. It's very odd to say [FOREIGN] you know, they usually say [FOREIGN]. Not that they can't say that at all, but it's much more odd to do that in Spanish than it is to do that in English, where you can say house as a single item. So again, what we see is that these very basic types of auditory sound processing serve as a building block for grammar, for more complex types of processing.
