GAME AS FACILITATOR IN DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL PERCEPTION FOR PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

Language is the highest form of communication, it’s given only to people and it is very important for children’s psychological development. In 5 – 6 years most of the children all native language’s sounds pronounce correctly, phonological perception is formed, however, not all children have reached an appropriate level of development, therefore compulsory preparatory school program of language acquisition in children creates an aversion to learning. Disorders of fonological perception are very complicated and require a lot of serious and patient work in the intervention. In 5 – 6 years of age, children are active, open, spontaneous, curious and very persistent. At this age closest activities for children are plays and games and in these activities they acquires their own life experience.

Changes in voicing perception by adult French speakers after identification training

ABSTRACTThe aim of the present study was to investigate changes in voicing identification, discrimination, and categorical perception induced by identification training centered on three different training values. One group of French-speaking adults was trained across a universal auditory boundary (−30 ms voice onset time), and two other groups were trained across arbitrary boundaries (−45 or −60 ms voice onset time). A control group did not receive any training. The results showed that both the −30 and the −45 training groups exhibited a 10 ms shift in the identification boundary. Moreover, for the −30 training group, discrimination and categorical perception changed around the French phonological boundary. These results illustrate the possibility of modifying the French phonological perception after short-time training, particularly when centered on a universal boundary. However, training only had limited effects and even strengthened the phonological boundary, congruent with the hypothesis that this boundary is acquired by a perceptual “coupling” between universal boundaries.

Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: evidence from nasal clusters

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalising marked structures, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky 2004). The account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual ‘repairs’ to structures ungrammatical in the hearer's language. As onset clusters of falling sonority are typologically marked relative to those of rising sonority (Greenberg 1978), we examine English speakers' perception of nasal-initial clusters, which are lacking in English. We find greater accuracy for rising-sonority clusters, evidencing knowledge of markedness constraints favouring such onset clusters. The misperception of sonority falls cannot be accounted for by stimulus artefacts (the materials are perceived accurately by speakers of Russian, a language allowing nasal-initial clusters) nor by phonetic failure (English speakers misperceive falls even with printed materials) nor by putative relations of such onsets to the statistics of the English lexicon.