From: LAURA SLOCUM 1. Can you explain the (non) VC effect across experiments? 2. What do you think is the mechanism behind the familiar CV/CC effect? I mean, do you think that children recognize "hey, I can make that sequence...it's like the sequence in ___." Or, do you think it's more like riding a bike in that, since the articulatory gesture is familiar, when the child produces a novel word with a familiar sequence, it just happens 'easier'? From: nagar@ling.ohio-state.edu This study talks about the relationship of lexical items of the language the child is exposed to, to the phonological development that the child will have. The authors claim that there is a connection between acquisitions of the phonology of a language to the lexical items that the child remembers of hears constantly. The authors raise the issue of the difference between the child?s productions and the researcher?s interpretations of those productions. The paper also talks about the relationship of babbling and sound production by the child. This connection is proven with the help of experiments done with children between the ages of 3 and 5. The experiments give the following results: Experiment 1: This experiment shows that the child produces novel CV or CC constructions with a much less frequency than she produces the familiar CV or CC constructions. Experiment 2: Familiar sounds are produced more frequently in CV and CC constructions. This did not hold true for the VC constructions. Both the experiments showed that there is a connection between familiarity of lexicon and production/acquisition of sounds. From: Fangfang Li 1. how is the accuracy of children's production measured? what kind of errors exhibited by the inaccurate productions? are those inaccurate ones show some "sublexcial" bias towards the familiar target sequence? 2. in addition to accuracy measurement, this experiment may be augmented by measuring the reaction time for a child to repeat, which should yield similar result since novel sequence will require longer time of motor planning. 3. if we were to further divide familiar words into more familiar and common familiar and less familiar according to their biphone frequecy, should we expect a similar result? questions regarding wordlist 2 (Table 14.2) 1. in CV sequence, "gu" and "gau" have been paired together. the assumption here is that "au" is a single phone as "u". am i interpreting it correctly? if yes, i would qestion the validity of this assumption, since "au" is inherently more complex than "u" in that it involves more complicated moter gesturing and time of coordination. and this could be a confounder that can alternatively explain the less accurate productions by children. 2. all the VC sequences end with a stop, which is perceptually less salient than, say fricatives. i am wondering what the results would be if a pair ending with a fricative or a glide would be like. 3. another confouder in the list is the position of the biphone. it is in word-initial position for CV, word-final for VC and word-internal for CC. why not control for the position by putting all the biphones to the beginning of the words, say? my impression for words like "moftin" is that i would treat it as a disyllabic word, and put a boundary between f and t in producing it. From: Eun Jong Kong The study claims that phonological unit is gradually emergent in the course of lexical acquisition. The more the kids learn language (lexicon), the more they can be aware of the independent use of each phone. The experiment was designed for testing the frequency effect of sublexical recognition by examining infant's ability to produce non-words accurately. questions; 1. Could you describe the procedure/criteria of the accuracy judgement on produced forms? What kind of productions from kids did fall into the 'incorrect' category? 2. I don't think I understand the rationale of your including 'VC' sequence as one type of stimuli, and the results of 'VC' type that pattens differently from 'CV' and 'CC' type of stimili in and . - The results of 'VC' type of sequence would indicate that, when infants are sublexicalizing a speech string, 'VC' is not the intermediate structure of sublexicons (but rather 'VC' or 'CC') that infants are storing the frequent sequence information. ?? From: HELENA RIHA p. 209 ?Does pattern frequency in the lexicon figure similarly in the acquisition of ?lower-level? phonological patterns? ? To answer this question, we (compared) imitative productions of ?novel? versus ?familiar? two-segment sequences. We predicted that the children would repeat the novel target sequences significantly less accurately than the familiar ones.? How much of an effect did the target words? similarity to real words have on the children?s productions? In Experiment 2, for example, ?many of the errors resulted in syllables that matched real words? (p. 215). Was it not generally the case that the children tried to match the non-words to words they already had in their lexicon, thinking something like ?this word sounds like X? and subsequently saying something like X? If this was their strategy, would it affect interpretation of the results? p. 211 Fig. 14.1 ?Motor scores for three distinct babbling routines or early words.? Could we go over this figure? I?m still not sure how it shows that the child might store components as independent sub-units. How does the child realize that in ?bottle?, the tongue goes from neutral to target position if it is always in neutral position in ?baby? and target position in ?daddy?. The child has no practice making such a switch until it actually learns the word ?bottle?. Given the idea that children learn CV articulatory routines appearing in particular positions in words, based on Figure 14.1, we would expect that a child would be unable to produce [dixbA] (using [dix] as the first syllable and [bA] as the second) if this were a real word to be learned. Is that a correct prediction? p. 213 ?The child was instructed to repeat the ?funny made-up words? as accurately as possible.? An important insight I learned from foreign language teaching and from observing the training of broadcasters in China was that simulated language tasks had to have a communicative purpose to be effective. In foreign language teaching, students did activities for specific purposes. In broadcast training, announcers practiced reading scripts in the context of a particular type of program and audience. I?m not sure that it was clear to the children in the experiment for what purpose they were repeating the funny made-up words. The task was clear, but was the purpose clear? They may have been thinking: Why do I need to repeat the made-up words accurately? Is this a game? Is it a test? The fact that the children may not have had a clear purpose in doing the task may make it difficult to know what they were attending to in hearing the acoustic signal and in repeating the nonsense word s. They may have been listening for similarity to familiar words and repeating based on that, or they may have been listening for individual sequences of segments and repeating based on those perceptions. Related to Eunjong?s point in our previous set of comments, it is important to determine what level of acoustic detail the children were listening for to know how they interpreted what they heard. The children in the experiment may have been tuning into different levels of a coustic detail in doing the task which may have influenced their productions. Kathleen Currie Hall Summary: In this paper, the authors describe how the lexical frequency of particular _combinations_ or sequences of sounds influences children's ability to produce those sequences, providing evidence for a model in which phonological subunits such as phonemes are emergent from the representation of larger sequences. Details: 1. Previous research has shown that linguistic development hinges on vocabulary growth -- i.e., amount of experience with the ambient language. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate this point experimentally for small phonological units such as the phoneme. 2. The notion of duality of patterning in human language divides language into meaningful units on the one hand and subunits on the other, which have no inherent meaning but which can usefully be put together to form meaningful units (i.e., there is not a one-to-one correspondence between every unit of sound and every unit of meaning). The question, however, is how these non-meaningful subunits are acquired; the claim here is that they emerge from larger sequences of words as children become more familiar with overlapping sequences in different words. 3. If these generalizations really are emergent, and if children really do acquire sequences of phonemes before they acquire the individual phonemes, then children should have an easier time imitating nonsense words with familiar sequences than with unfamiliar sequences, even when both types of sequences are made up of phones that the child has mastered. 4. Two experiments were run. In each, children were asked to repeat back nonsense words with sequences that were either frequent or virtually non-existent in English. The words were controlled for how well adults could repeat them and how "wordlike" adults thought they were. The second experiment differed from the first in the exact identity of a few of the nonsense words. The number of phones produced correctly in each word was counted as a measure of accuracy. 5. In both experiments, it was found that familiar sequences were produced more accurately than unfamiliar sequences. This effect was true, however, only for CV and CC sequences, not for VC sequences. 6. The second experiment was also run on phonologically disordered children. Here, the effects were even larger and more consistent across all three types of sequences (CV, VC, and CC) -- familiar sequences of familiar phones are easier than unfamiliar sequences of familiar phones. 7. The authors conclude that children generate sequences of sounds in their phonological representation, based on the frequency of sequences in the language they are learning. That is, children start by learning whole words; then realize that there are subunits of words that can be put together to form words and start storing these; eventually, the individual phonemes will emerge from these larger sequences. Questions: 1. How was "correctness" decided in production? 2. Not sure I understand how "wordlikeness" was actually controlled. Of the ratings given, some seem misleading -- e.g. familiar sequence [m'oftin] as 3.8 on a scale of 1-5 for wordlikeness, while its unfamiliar sequence counterpart [m'ofken] was rated 2.4. How close did the ratings have to be? Doesn't this have an effect? 3. Why did VC sequences not have any effect of frequency? From: ASIMINA SYRIKA This article presents some interesting results on the effect of sequence frequency on accuracy of production. -I liked the idea of using a corpus of spontaneous speech elicited from first-graders to select frequently occurring words. I'd like to know a little more about this corpus, though. For example, how the speech was elicited, what the context was, where the children were from etc. Also, on what criteria were the two segment sequences that were used in the experiment selected? Which were the 12 consonants-vowels used? -Did you account for subject matching? Were all 16 children from the same social class or background? Were they all monolingual? What about the children who were used to create the corpus of word forms? -How do you explain the fact that familiarity had a larger effect on the accuracy of production of children with phonological disorders? What do you mean when you say that the 'effect of familiarity...was more consistent' for these children? (p. 216-7) -What is a sublexical representation and how do you know that it exists? -What is a [+lingual] and a [-lingual] syllable? From: Kirk Baker Paper asks if frequency effects in phonological production can be observed in children. If phonological units emerge from lexicon, should be observable from productions of novel items containing sequences of varying frequency. If children have coarse segmentation, unfamiliar sequences will be harder than the same segments but in frequent sequence. Results support. Question: Is the same effect observed for adults? Predict that yes, but what does it say about phonological representation vs. a surface-only, well-practiced articulatory sequence? Representation and practice effect possibly distinct? From: Junko Davis This study shows that there is the frequency effect on children's productions of segment sequences. - I am not sure how to interpret the wordlikeness scores. There seem to be quit e a few cases in which the novel word gets a higher score than its familiar counterpart. Isn't this supposed to be the other way around? - Could there be any effect of the difference in the speaker of the recording between Word list 1 and Word list 2? - It seems that the VC sequences are not affected by the familiarity effect. Why is this?