Jan Edwards PhD, Graduate Center of CUNY Research Scientist Professor, Communicative Disorders Contact Information Waisman Center UW-Madison 1500 Highland Avenue Madison, WI 53705 608 262-6768 jedwards2@wisc.edu

My research focuses on the interactions between phonological acquisition and lexical acquisition.  If children develop a phonological system based on generalizations over the lexicon, then children with larger vocabularies should have more finely-detailed phonological representations and, conversely, children with smaller vocabularies should have less finely-detailed phonological representations.  We also expect to see an interaction between phonological development and lexical development.  I’ve developed this line of research, examining the phonological and lexical development of both typically developing children (Edwards, Beckman, and Munson, 2004) and children with phonological disorders (Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005).    My current research, in collaboration with Mary Beckman of Ohio State University, focuses on a cross-linguistic examination of phonological acquisition. We are examining the acquisition of word-initial lingual obstruents in four languages: English, Greek, Cantonese, and Japanese.  These languages differ in phonological structure and in phoneme frequency in the lexicon.  Pilot work shows that phoneme frequency influences both order and rate of phonological acquisition.  For example, "th" is relatively more frequent than "s" in Greek, as compared to English and Greek-speaking children produce "th" more accurately than English-speaking children.  Also, "sh" is relatively more frequent than "s" in Japanese as compared to English, and Japanese-speaking children produce "sh" more accurately than "s", while the opposite is true for English-speaking children.  In the next phase of the project, we plan to test a larger number of 2- through 5-year-old children in each language and also to examine the interaction between vocabulary size and phonological acquisition.