Linguistics 825 -- Seminar in Advanced Phonetics -- Acquistion

Spring 2005 (Call No. 11899-2 -- 05 credit hours)

Contents

Description

Study of specific problems in articulatory and acoustic phonetics at an advanced level.

The problem addressed in Spring 2005 will be phonological acquisition -- specifically, the ontogeny of the phonological grammar and its relationship to the changing phonetic skills and evolving levels of representation in the mental lexicon of the individual child over the course of the first six years of life. Questions that we will consider include the following:

  1. Are there identifiable stages defined by appearance of different types of phonological capabilities? If so, what does the child "know" at these different stages of acquisition, and what does this tell us, if anything, about the organization of phonological knowledge in the fully competent adult speaker that the typically-developing child eventually becomes?
  2. What is the input like at different stages of acquisition and for different phonological processes or functions? Does the principle of "continuity" of development require that input be the same at different stages and for different processes?
  3. Also, what is the role of variability in the input? Related to this, when does sociolinguistic competence begin to emerge both in realtionship to the social functions of language and in relationship to the referential functions of language?
  4. More generally, what are the constraints on acquisition? Can we sort out universal constraints from language-specific constraints, and if so, where do the universal constraints come from?

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Administration

Class Times and Locations:

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. to 1:18 p.m. in 207 Pomerene.

Instructor:

Mary E. Beckman
office: room 07 Oxley, tel 292-9752
email: mbeckman@ling.osu.edu
office hours: Wednesdays 10:00-11:00, most Fridays 2:00-3:00, & by appointment.

Coursework:

The coursework consists of three components, and the course grade will be based on these three components as follows: (1) 40% on the assigned group readings; (2) 30% on three data analysis exercises; (3) 30% on the two parts of the term project.

  1. Assigned group readings: We will be reading and discussing one or two articles each week together in class, and an essential ongoing part of the coursework is to keep up with the readings and to contribute to the in-class discussion. To that end, each of you should send me a brief (three or four sentences) review of salient points in each reading, to collate into class notes which will be posted incrementally to the web page. This should be done before we discuss the reading. See the schedule of readings to see approximately when we will be covering each reading. (Many readings can be got online through the library's online journal collection. For most readings, and for all readings not available in this way, there will be a master hard copy placed in the course mailbox in Oxley 222. I will try to put these there at least two weeks before the first class meeting where we discuss the topic.)
  2. Exercises in data analysis: We will also be getting an appreciation of some of the primary data types that phonologists work with when they study acquisition by doing three transcription/tagging/acoustic-analysis exercises, using material from the paidologos project. Each of these exercises will take place over a two-week period, and typically will have an in-class introductory component and an out-of-class "lab" component you can do in the linguistics lab or at home on your own PC. We will discuss these data together in class in conjunction with the readings and ideas that we are going over during the weeks that we do them. Deadlines for sending me the TextGrid files and/or acoustic analyses are on the schedule of assignments.
  3. Term project: Coursework also includes the development of individual projects; each of you will choose a more specific question of personal interest, develop an annotated bibliography of relevant readings, and design a study that could be done to address the chosen question. There is a succession of interim deadlines for various parts of the term project, listed on the schedule of assignments. These fall into two general categories -- the choice of topic and topic design (with three deadlines for reporting on progress on this front), and the background reading (with two deadlines for choosing the initial set of readings and for turning in the annotated bibliography). Each of these categories will count of 15% of the grade. (Note that this schedule assumes that the study will only be designed this quarter, and carried out at some later time -- e.g., as part of the preparation of a 3rd Year Paper or thesis research. However, anyone who already has a relevant study at a fairly detailed level of development is encouraged to arrange with me to adapt his or her schedule of project reports to make the completion of this study, rather than the design, be the term project.)
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Schedule of readings

The following list includes both assigned readings that everyone reads as part of the coursework and optional readings that you can read if you are particularly interested in the topic. (Your bibliography also will be linked into this part, either under the topic to which they relate, or separately under another new topic heading if you work on something that can't be shoehorned into the five topic headings.) After the introductory reading in the first week, the readings for subsequent weeks have been divided into sets addressing particular topics. It is important to read the assigned readings in each set before the first of the class meetings where we're scheduled to discuss the topic in class, in order to make our collated notes be a useful starting point for discussion. By 6:00 a.m. on the day of the first class meeting, e-mail to me a brief synopsis (two or three sentences) of salient points or questions for each assigned reading that we will be covering in class.

Week 1 (class meetings March 28 & 30) -- Overview of phonological development.

(1) Weeks 2 & 3 (class meetings April 4, 6, 11 [on which discussion of exercise 1], & 13) -- Jakobson's "strict and invariable temporal sequence" and the challenge of "variable paths"; neo-Jakobsonian attempts to acommodate to inter-individual variability in deterministic models of typical and atypical phonological development. (2) Week 4 (class meetings April 18 & 20) -- Understanding the extent of variability within a child: the phenomenon of covert contrast. (3) Weeks 5 & 6 (class meetings April 25 [on which discussion of exercise 2] & 27, May 2 & 4) -- Word learning and the nature of input representations. (4) Week 7 (class meetings May 9 [discussion of exercise 3] & 11 [presentations of project topics]) -- Maturational effects and the relationship to input. (5) Weeks 8 & 9 (class meetings May 16, 18, 23, & 25 [5-min presentations of project design]) -- The function and nature of the input at two stages of development. Week 10 (class meeting June 1) No readings -- 15 minute class presentations.

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Notes from class

This part will be filled in as the course progresses.

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Schedule of other assignments

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Useful links

More links will be added here as the course progresses and we discover other web resources that are potentially relevant to the questions we are addressing as a group and/or in our individual term projects.

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Address comments and queries about this page to: mbeckman@ling.osu.edu