From: LAURA SLOCUM The common theme in this week's readings [(Pater et. al, 2004; Stoel-Gammon (1998); Edwards (2000); Beckman & Edwards (2000)] is lexical learning and the relationship between phonological and lexical knowledge in child language acquisition. Regarding Stoel-Gammon 1998): 1) I would most certainly agree that articulation (motor-speech planning) influences productive lexical ability and that "practice makes perfect" when it comes to speech (as with many other things). I agree that children (and even adults!) have certain phonological preferences, which impact their productive lexicon. However, we must also acknowledge that children at young ages do not have access to as diverse and rich a vocabulary as adults (e.g., lack many synonyms for words). Therefore, their "avoidance" strategies are only going to take them so far and there are going to be many situations in which the child will have to attempt production of an "unpreferred" sound or sound sequence in words. This may result in articulation errors, which may be reinforcing to those "misarticulated" C or CV sequence and promote lexical development in that direction. From: ASIMINA SYRIKA -How universal is babbling? Do all children babble? Is babbling different across languages? -Babbling is observed in deaf infants, too. How is this babbling different from the babbling of children who can listen to input? Is the babbling of deaf children more 'meaningless' without any elements (eg.prosodic features) that resemble the language the child is exposed to? -In the case of international adoptions when a child is taken away from his/her linguistic environment during the babbling stage and he/she is exposed to a completely different language how will that affect the transition to speech? -Are bilingual infants (those exposed to more than language from birth) at an advantage for early word learning since they are exposed to two phonological systems instead of one? -Do children with language disorders receive different input from caregivers than typically-developing ones? From: Junko Davis Does the analysis of the phonetic properties of the words from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) represent the actual children's targets or based on the adult targets? This question may not make much sense, since I am not sure what exact nature of the "CDI" is. In the article it says "a parent report from that assesses productive vocabulary by means of a checklist of commonly used words and phrases." (p.35) Is it possible that a parent marks a word, for instance "shoe," on the checklist when it is produced by a child as "su"? It is very surprising to see how much discrepancy there is between the precocious talkers and the late talkers. What can be the source of this discrepancy? Is it genetic? Is it environmental? Or is it a concoction of multiple factors? From: Kirk Baker Prelinguistic vocal behavior influences subsequent meaningful speech; feature type frequency correlated with correct production; lexicon size and phonological skill correlated. p. 44 Because of our transcription exercises I now think there's nothing but the weakest association between articulation and perception (transcription), so I wonder how the correct productions would stack up against an acoustic confusion matrix of the coda C for the same sequences. Or maybe acoustic variance within each C. From: nagar@ling.ohio-state.edu The paper talks about the relationship of phonology and lexical acquisition. The author says that phonology of a language affects the way in which lexical items of the language would be acquired. She talks about experiments done on children between 8 and 36 months old and describes the sounds and lexemes related to the sounds and how sounds effect the acquisition of lexemes. The simplest example is that of the child acquiring the word for daddy before the word for mummy because it involves the production of alveolar which are easier than nasals to produce. Page 31 2nd paragraph: How did she realize that the child was producing these particular words, especially another? Page 32 1st paragraph: I did not understand the part about the child producing words which have no connection to the target word. How does this relate to the general point that she is trying to make. Page 34 2nd paragraph: The author relates sounds that children do not produce certain sounds at age 36 weeks. Does this not depend on the input that the child is getting? Would this be the same for an Arabic, Urdu, French learning kid? Page 47 Table 3: Are there any explanations as to why /p/ is not in the inventory of 21 and 24 month typically developing kids. The table says that /p/ can occur in the final inventory in a typically developing 24 months old, why not in the initial inventory? From: HELENA RIHA p. 29 "Target words with phonetic properties that mirror a child's prelinguistic vocalizations will be acquired earlier than words with features that are not present in the prespeech repertoire." How does this square with the desire to learn particular words in a child's environment? When I read this, I thought of a particular list of children's first words given in a psycholinguistics textbook (Jay 2003, p. 368) that included difficult-to-pronounce words like Rover, allgone, outside, milk, and please in addition to mommy, daddy, and ball. The list did not show the order of acquisition, but all of these words were given as first words. How would Stoel-Gammon account for the presence of this mix of words as a child's first words? A child could acquire a difficult word whose features are not present in its prespeech repertoire simply by reducing or changing its articulation to whatever features are present in its repertoire; the word may not have to be avoided altogether. For example, I remember the case of one child learning the word milk who called it [kaka]. There's also Stoel-Gammon's example of [Su] pronounced as [du] or [su]. Stoel-Gammon seems to imply, however, that a child may not learn a word unless its properties mirror those of the child's prelinguistic vocalizations, noting that "there are no reports of a lexical selection pattern in which the critical feature was not a part of the child's productive repertoire" (p. 30). p. 31 "Lexical selection in some children involves creation of a template (word recipe) that is applied to the pronunciation of words sharing certain phonetic properties." "Children attend to and attempt to reproduce the most salient features of a target word." This supports the idea that children may develop strategies for acquiring difficult words in contrast to Stoel-Gammon's claim that children acquire words that resemble their babbles. Rather than avoiding difficult words, children can modify adult targets to conform to articulatory routines they are capable of producing. Stoel-Gammon's discussion leads me to wonder what she means by "acquiring" a word. She notes that "children tend to acquire words with phonological features that they can produce and avoid words with features that are difficult for them" (p. 34). It seems that a more accurate statement may be that children will acquire whatever words they need but will make them conform to the features of their phonetic inventory (e.g. Waterson's (1971) example of another being pronounced as [n~an~a] (p. 31)). p. 35 "The age of acquisition" is defined as the age at which the word appeared in the vocabularies of at least half the children in a particular age group. The appearance of a word in a child's vocabulary and correct production are two different issues. Did the words in Stoel-Gammon's study have to be produced correctly? As Waterson's (1971) examples and Leonard and McGregor's (1991) (Snoopy [nupis], p. 32) examples show, when words first appear in a child's vocabulary, they may barely resemble adult targets. This does not mean, however, that the words have not been acquired. p. 45 "Children with smaller vocabularies have limited phonetic inventories." Just to play devil's advocate here, could it be that these children have a larger internal vocabulary than assumed but cannot express it very well? It may be that they have a larger mental lexicon than their productions suggest but that they are using a more limited phonetic inventory to express words. As a result, their productions are not understood as effectively as those of children with a typically developing phonological system, and it appears as if they have a limited vocabulary. (This is somewhat like the covert contrast issue we discussed. Children may have certain contrasts that are not perceptible to listeners. Along the same lines, children may have mental representations of lexical items but may express them with a limited set of forms.) From: Eun Jong Kong This article introduces series of researches focusing on the effects of infants' articulatory practice in lexical acquisition across time. It concludes that the phonetic forms they practiced more positively affect the initial stage of lexical acquisition, whereas,later, the size of lexicon and phonetic inventory helps each other. - I'm wondering whether the author is distinguishing two terms such as 'phonology' and 'phonetic', and so whether I had to read the article paying attention to the differences. For example, when she says the role of 'phonology', would she mean to refer to the role of the infants' mental representation of a particular segment, as opposed to the role of any spoken(realized) samples? -What is the conventional method to investigate the phonological preference of an infant? If it's just by looking at the phonological structure of frequently used(produced) lexicons, isn't it circular? Kathleen Currie Hall Notes on: Stoel-Gammon, Carol. 1998. Sounds and words in early language acquisition: The relationship between lexical and phonological development. In Paul Rhea (ed.), Exploring the speech-language connection (Vol. 8, pp. 25-52). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. Summary: In this chapter, the author outlines some of the research that has been done on the connections between a child's phonological abilities and his lexical development. She shows that early phonological ability is correlated with larger and faster vocabulary development, and that frequency of occurrence in the lexicon being developed correlates with articulatory ability. Details: 1. Sounds that are "practiced" a lot (e.g. in babble) tend to be used in first words (though not always). 2. Earlier age of babbling correlates with earlier developmet of speech; larger numbers of vocalizations correlates with larger vocabulary sizes; larger numbers of babbled syllables correlates with earlier age of first words; larger numbers of syllable and sound types early on correlates with much later language tests. 3. There is also evidence that a child may acquire lexical items first that seem to match the child's "personal preference." 4. There is a "typical" development pattern for order of acquisition of particular sounds (see p. 33-34). There is also a "standard" list of words that 50% of 30-month-old children have acquired, which Stoel-Gammon treats as a "target lexicon" for acquisition. She shows that there is a correlation between the sounds acquired early and the frequency of words starting with that sound. 5. Children with larger lexicons tend to have larger inventories of speech sounds and syllable types. 6. Delay in talking doesn't seem to correspond to phonological deviance -- late talkers are simply that; they behave like typically developing children at a younger age. Questions: 1. While Stoel-Gammon does acknowledge the illegitimacy of this at the end of the article (p. 49), I'm concerned by her tendency to conflate correlation and causation. For example, p. 28 -- perhaps there is some external factor that makes certain children "better" language learners than others; this means they are more likely to babble earlier and more, and more likely to talk more. There is no a priori need to posit that "babbling serves as a foundation" or that babbling provides the child with "building blocks" for later speech. Have there been studies / effective speech treatments that kids are for example taught to babble more and then show actual improvement in their speech abilities? 2. p. 30-31 -- Regarding the notion of a child's "personal preference" -- why assume that the preference is caused by the child's ability to produce the preferred sounds? Alternatives: perhaps child finds a particular sound perceptually intriguing, and then practices it and uses it in words. Also mentioned -- frequency in input? Have there been studies on twins to see if they tend to have the same personal preferences? 3. p. 32 -- The child who moves all fricatives to the end of a word -- seems like a very strange / unattested "sound change" in natural languages, but clearly possible in a human phonology acquirer. What does this tell us about phonological "naturalness" and possible rules? 4. p. 34 -- "Children must eventually attempt to produce words with phonetic features beyond their capabilities if they are to acquire new words." Why? Isn't it hypothetically possible that children just continually extended their babbling to include new phonetic features and didn't try new words until the features had been acquired in babbling? What does the fact that children DON'T do this tell us about language acquisition? Just that children are interested in acquiring the sound-meaning pairing? 5. Stoel-Gammon acknowledges that it would be nice to compare acquisition effects with frequency of occurrence in the ambient adult lexicon (p. 50). However, I kept being confused by her use of "target lexicon" to mean the 598 words that 50% of 30-month-old kids have acquired. While I see her point that the frequency of sounds in these words mirrors the order and strength of acquisition of individual sounds occurring in those words, I wonder how much overlap there is in these claims; i.e., how tautological are her claims? If a child is said to have acquired a phoneme when it occurs in words, why should it be surprising that sounds acquired first are those that appear in early words? (Is it just the _frequency_ of words with a particular sound that is important here? That is, is there ever a sound acquired early on that is not used in words spoken by the child but is highly frequent in the "target lexicon"?) 6. p. 47 -- What is meant by "accuracy of production was not considered"? How far was this taken? E.g. if a child produces [dUk] for [trUk], does he get counted as having a [tr] cluster in his lexicon? 7. p. 47 -- "Precocious talkers at age 20 months had larger phonetic inventories than the typically developing children at age 24 months" -- but at 20 months, the p.t.s had vocabularies almost twice as large as the t.d.s -- why make this comparison?? Why not compare p.t.s at 20 months with t.d.s with vocabularies of equivalent sizes? From: Fangfang Li This paper investigate the relationship between phonological development and lexical developement, and it claims that the two reinforce with each other, although phonological patterns seems to affect lexcial acquisition at the very beginning. important points: 1. babbling is an important preparatory stage for the acquisition of speech and language. children who explore more CV syllables were documented to have a smoother transition to speech, whereas lack of sufficient CV types usually lead to small vocabulary size later on. 2. the frequency of early lexicons in childhood parallel in some ways with the order of phonological acquisition, together with other factors including articulatory ease, position of the sound, and syllable types etc. question: pp 30, it mentions that "children attempt to say words with sounds and syllable structures they can accurately produce and avoid words that are difficult for them phonologically". it is not clear to what extent these phonological constraits will have on lexical acquisition. do children have the lexcial representation but just could not produce it at all or it is asserting to the extreme that these phonological impossibles make lexical acquisition of these words impossible? i would say that although children could not produce it, it does not mean they do not have it in their lexicons, otherwise how to explain the huge number of homophones early in children's speech?