LSA 101 -- Acquistion of Speech Production

Summer 2009 -- Session 1 course at the 65th LSA Summer Institute, University of California, Berkeley

Contents

• Description
• Readings
• Useful links

Description

Synopsis: Children learn to talk in an extraordinarily short period of time. Over the first few years of life, they quickly progress from the practicing the simple coos, squeals, and rudimentary syllable-like utterances of early vocal play to saying words and longer utterances that contain recognizable forms of most of the vowels and consonants of what will be the native language. We have been investigating this developmental progression for more than a century. Our understanding has gone well beyond the descriptive generalizations that could be made with the tools available to the child language researchers who produced the early 20th century diary studies that informed Jakobson's seminal papers on children's speech and its relationship to universals of phonological systems and frequently attested patterns of sound change. This course will first give a brief overview of how far we have come since Jakobson (1941) in our understanding of phonological development, and then survey a few of the observational tools, analytic methods, and models that we need to be developing now to advance as far in the next six decades.

Themes and goals: In order to make the survey most relevant to your (pl) interests, we will structure the survey to focus on the following themes, which emerged in the first Who am I? posting to the Course goals, etc. forum:

• The relationship between speech acquisition and language universals, and ...
• ...the things that research on speech acquisition can tell us about phonological representation and process in general, and also ...
• ...about representations and processes at other levels of the grammar.
• The relationship between acquisition of representations and processes for speech production and acquisition of representations and processes for perception and comprehension of others' speech.
• The relationship (differences & commonalities) among first language acquisition, bilingual first language acquisition, and (later) second language acquisition.
• Cross-fertilization between research on typical speech development across languages and research on speech and language disorder, and ...
• ... insights from acquisition of the phonology of signed languages.
• Acquisition of prosody at the level of the CV segment and above, and ...
• ... corresponding relationship between aquisition of speech production and acquisition of representations and processes at other levels of the grammar.

Readings

The relationship between speech acquisition and language universals.

• Roman Jakobson (1939). The sound laws of child language and their place in general phonology. Paper written for the Fifth International Congress of Linguists, Brussels. Translation by Rodney Sangster published in Roman Jakobson (1971). Studies in child language and aphasia, pp. 7-20. The Hague: Mouton.
• John L. Locke (1980). Mechanisms of phonological development in children maintenance, learning and loss. Papers from the 16th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 220-238.
• John L. Locke (1990). Structure and stimulation in the ontogeny of spoken language. Developmental Psychobiology, 23(7), 62 1-643.
• R. D. Kent (1984). Psychobiology of speech development: Coemergence of language and a movement system. American Journal of Physiology -- Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 246(6), R888-R894.
• Peter F. MacNeilage, Barbara L. Davis, Ashlynn Kinney, and Christine L. Matyear (2000). (New directions for child development in the twenty-first century) The motor core of speech: A comparison of serial organization patterns in infants and languages. Child Development, 71(1), 153-163.
• Jan Edwards and Mary E. Beckman (2008). Some cross-linguistic evidence for modulation of implicational universals by language-specific frequency effects in the acquisition of consonant phonemes. Language Learning & Development, 4 (1): 122-156.
• Bart de Boer (2000). Self organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics, 28 (4), 441-465. [also see other papers listed on Bart de Boer's publications page.

The relationship ... (cont.) -- variable paths

• Marilyn May Vihman (1993). Variable paths to early word production. Journal of Phonetics, 21 (1-2), 61-82. [suggested by Morgan Sonderegger]
• Marilyn Vihman and William Croft (2007). Phonological development: toward a "radical" templatic phonology. Linguistics, 45(4), 683-725.
• Lise Menn, Ellen Schmidt, and Brent Nicholas. (2009). Conspiracy and sabotage in the acquisition of phonology: dense data undermine existing theories, provide scaffolding for a new one. Language Sciences, 31, 285-304.
• Karla McGregor, Li Sheng, and Bruce Smith (2005). The precocious two-year-old: status of the lexicon and links to the grammar. Journal of Child Language, 32 (3), 563-585.
• Bruce Smith, Karla K. McGregor and Darcie DeMille (2006). Phonological development in lexically precocious two-year-olds. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 355-375.

On vowel development

• Susan Rvachew, Karen Mattock, Linda Polka, and Lucie Ménard (2006). Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space: The case of Canadian English and Canadian French. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120, 2250-2259.
• Susan Rvachew, Abdulsalam Alhaidary, Karen Mattock, Linda Polka, and Lucie Ménard (2008). Emergence of the corner vowels in the babble produced by infants exposed to Canadian English or Canadian French. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 564-577.
• ... and other papers by Lucie Ménard that are listed on her UQAM Laboratoire de phoné'tique home page.]
• Ilana Heintz, Mary E. Beckman, Eric Fosler-Lussier, and Lucie Ménard (2009). Evaluating parameters for mapping adult vowels to imitative babbling. InterSpeech2009. [Also see description of this research at the Simulating the social dynamics of motherese in learning vowel postures NSF highlight page.]

On contrast and covert contrast in consonant development

• Shari R. Baum and James C. McNutt (1990). An acoustic analysis of frontal misarticulation of /s/ in children. Journal of Phonetics, 18, 51-63.
• James M. Scobbie, Fiona Gibbon, William J. Hardcastle, and Paul Fletcher (2000). Covert contrast as a stage in the acquisition of phonetics and phonology. In Michael Broe and Janet Pierrehumbert, eds. Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Language Acquisition and the Lexicon, 194-207. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Jan Edwards, Fiona Gibbon, and Marios Fourakis (1997). On discrete changes in the acquisition of the alveolar/velar stop consonant contrast. Language and Speech, 40, 203-210. [This is a commentary/response to:
  Thomas Berg (1995). Sound change in child language: a study of inter-word variation. Language and Speech, 38, 331-363.
• Fangfang Li, Jan Edwards, Mary E. Beckman (2009). Contrast and covert contrast: The phonetic development of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English and Japanese toddlers. Journal of Phonetics, 37(1), 111-124.
• Katharine Davis (1995). Phonetic and Phonological Contrasts in the Acquisition of Voicing: Voice Onset Time Production in Hindi and English. Journal of Child Language, 22, 275-305. [Suggested by Tamara Sorenson Duncan.]

On acquisition of tone

• Puisan Wong, Richard G. Schwartz, and James J. Jenkins (2005). Perception and production of lexical tones by 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 48, 1065-1079.
• Also look for papers coming out of Denis Burnham's collaboration on tone perception and tone acquisition at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories.

The role of input

• Denis Burnham, Christine Kitamura, and Uté Vollmer-Conna. (2002) What's New Pussycat? On Talking to Babies and Animals. Science, 296, 1435. [suggested by Kaitlyn Pavlina.]

On bilingual acquisition, second language acquisition, and language attrition

• Christiane Laeufer (1997). Towards a typology of bilingual phonological systems. In A. R. James and J. Leather, eds., Second-language speech: Structure and process, 325-342. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [suggested by Charles Chang]
• Michele L. Sancier and Carol A. Fowler (1997). Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English. Journal of Phonetics, 27(4) 421-436. [suggested by Charles Chang]
• Valérie A. G. Ventureyra, Christophe Pallier, and Hi-yon Yoo (2004). The loss of first language phonetic perception in adopted Koreans. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 17, 79-91. [Suggested by Shanna Phillips.]
• Christophe Pallier, Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Baptiste Poline, Denis LeBihan, Anne-Marie Argenti, and Emmanuel Dupoux (2003). Brain imaging of language plasticity in adopted adults: Can a second language replace the first? Cerebral Cortex, 13, 155-161. [Suggested by Shanna Phillips.]
• Werker, Janet F., & Byers-Heinlein, Krista (2008). Bilingualism in infancy: First steps in perception and comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12 (4), 144-151. [suggested by Laura Morett]
• Schmid, Monika S., Barbara Köpke, Merel Keijzer and Lina Weilemar, eds. (2004). First language attrition: Interdisciplinary perspectives on methodological issues. John Benjamins. [suggested by Tamara Sorenson Duncan]
• Naska C. W. Law and Lydia K. H. So (2006). The relationship of phonological development and language dominance in bilingual Cantonese-Putonghua children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10 (4), 405-428.
• Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller, and Siân Munro (2001). Patterns in the acquisition of the Welsh lateral fricative. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 15-1&2, 3-7. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller, and Siân Munro (2001). The acquisition of the lateral fricative in Welsh-English bilinguals. Multilingua, 20-3, 269-284. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller, and Siân Munro (2001). The acquisition of the rhotic consonants by Welsh-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 5, 71-86. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• Janet S. Oh, Sun-Ah Jun, Leah M. Knightly, and Terry Kit-fong Au (2003). Holding on to childhood language memory. Cognition, 86, B53-B64. [Suggested by Shanna Phillips.]
• Terry Kit-fong Au, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Janet S. Oh (2002). Overhearing a language during childhood. Psychological Science, 13, 238-243.
• Terry Kit-fong Au Janet S. Oh, Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, and Laura F. Romo (2008). Salvaging a childhood language. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 998-1011.
• Leah M. Knightly, Sun-Ah Jun, Janet S. Oh, and Terry Kit-fong Au (2003). Production benefits of childhood overhearing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 114(1), 465-474.
• Charles B. Chang, Erin F. Haynes, Yao Yao, and Russell Rhodes. (2009). A tale of five fricatives: Consonantal contrast in heritage speakers of Mandarin. In Laurel MacKenzie, ed., University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 15(1), 37-43. Philadelphia, PA: Penn Linguistics Club.
• Charles B. Chang, Erin F. Haynes, Yao Yao, and Russell Rhodes. (to appear). The phonetic space of phonological categories in heritage speakers of Mandarin. In Proceedings from the 44th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
• Ann R. Bradlow, David B. Pisoni, Reiko Akahane-Yamada, and Yoh'ichi Tohkura. (1997). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101 (4), 2299-2310. [Suggested by Becky Huang.]
• Gisela Jia, Winifred Strange, Yanhong Wu, Julissa Collado, and Qi Guan (2006). Perception and production of English vowels by Mandarin speakers: Age-related differences vary with the amount of L2 exposure. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119 (2), 1118-1130. [Suggested by Becky Huang.]
• Naoyuki Takagi (2002). The limits of training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: Eight case studies. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111, 2887-2896. [Suggested by Becky Huang.]
• Susan G. Guion (2003). The vowel systems of Quichua-Spanish bilinguals: An investigation into age of acquisition effects on the mutual influence of the first and second languages. Phonetica, 60, 98-128. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• Susan G. Guion, Tetsuo Harada, and J. J. Clark (2004). Early and late Spanish-English bilinguals' acquisition of English word stress patterns. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 207-226. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• Kyoung-Ho Kang & Susan G. Guion (2006). Phonological systems in bilinguals: Age of learning effects on the stop consonant systems of Korean-English bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 1672-1683. [Suggested by Ying Chen.]
• See also many of the other papers on Susan Guion's publications page.
• Marilyn M. Vihman, Jarrad Lum, Guillaume Thierry, Satsuki Nakai, & Tamar Keren-Portnoy (2006). The onset of word form recognition in infants exposed to English, Welsh, or both English and Welsh. In P. McCardle & E. Hoff (Eds.), Childhood Bilingualism: Research on Infancy through school age. (pp. 30-44). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

On the relationship between speech production and speech perception and comprehension of others' speech

• Papers from special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics in which Susan Gathercole summarized her model of the relationship between nonword repetition and word learning [which Laura Morett asked about], including:
• Susan Gathercole (2006). Nonword repetition and word learning: The nature of the relationships. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(4), 513-543.
• Benjamin Munson (2006). Nonword repetition and levels of abstraction in phonological knowledge. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(4), 577-581.
• Susan Ellis Weismer and Jan Edwards (2006). The role of phonological storage deficits in specific language impairment: A reconsideration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(4), 556-562.
• Prahlad Gupta (2006). Nonword repetition, phonological storage, and multiple determinations. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(4), 564-568. [Also look at the other papers about building an explicit computational model of the processing mechanisms involved that are posted on the Language and Memory Lab web page.
• Marilyn M. Vihman, Rory A. DePaolis, & Tamara Keren-Portnoy (in press). Babbling and words: A Dynamic Systems perspective on phonological development. To appear in E. L. Bavin, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Susan Rvachew (2006). Longitudinal predictors of implicit phonological awareness skills. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 15, 165-176. [Also see many other papers listed on Susan Rvachew's home page.]

Computational modeling of the acquisition of speech production and perception

• Okko Rasanen, Unto K. Laine, and Toomas Altosaar (2008). Computational language acquisition by statistical bottom-up processing. Proceedings of Interspeech2008, pp. 1980-1983. [Also look at the other papers from Lou Boves's and Els den Os's ACORNS project site.]
• Louise E. Paatsch, Peter J. Blamey, Julia Z. Sarant, Lois F. A. Martin, and Catherine P. Bow (2004). Separating contributions of hearing, lexical knowledge and speech production to speech-perception scores in children with hearing impairments. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(4), 738-750.
• Melissa A. Redford and Risto Miikkulainen (2007). Rate effects on structure in a source-filter model of phonological development. Language, 83, 737-69. [see also other papers listed on Melissa Redford's website]

Acquisition of prosody and its relationship to other levels of grammar

• MacNeilage and Davis reference above ...
• Timothy Arbisi-Kelm and Mary E. Beckman (2009). Prosodic structure and consonant development across languages. To appear in Marina Vigário, Sóonia Frota, and Maria Joãn Freitas, eds. Interactions in phonetics and phonology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• also see references to developmental disfluencies in
  Timothy Arbisi-Kelm (in press). Intonation structure and disfluency in stuttering. To appear in Cécile Fougeron and Mariapaola D'Imperio, eds. Laboratory Phonology 10.
• Marilyn May Vihman, Rory A. DePaolis, and Barbara L. Davis (1998). Is there a "trochaic bias in early word learning? Evidence from infant production in English and French. Child Development, 69 (4), 935-949.
• Louann Gerken and Karla K. McGregor (1998). An overview of prosody and its role in normal and disordered child language. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 7, 38-48.
• Clartje C. Levelt, Niels O. Schiller, and Willem J. M. Levelt (2000). The acquisition of syllable types. Language Acquisition, 8, 237-264. [Suggested by Morgan Sonderegger.]
• Katherine Demuth (1996). The prosodic structure of early words. In James Morgan & Katherine Demuth, eds., Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 171-184. [Suggested by Meredith Brown.]
• Katherine Demuth (1994). On the 'underspecification' of functional categories in early grammars. In Barbara Lust, Margarita Suñer, and John Whitman, eds., Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, pp. 119-134. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Suggested by Emily Nava.]
• Also see papers guest edited by Katherine Demuth (2006) on Crosslinguistic perspectives on the development of prosodic words. Special Issue, Language and Speech 49 (2), 129-297.
• Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Marinella Majorano, & Marilyn M. Vihman (2009). From phonetics to phonology: The emergence of first words in Italian. Journal of Child Language, 36, 235-267. (link to paper on Dr. Keren-Portnoy's page)
• Marilyn May Vihman, Satsuki Nakai, & Rory DePaolis (2006). Getting the rhythm right: A cross-linguistic study of segmental duration in babbling and first words. In L. Goldstein, D. Whalen & C. Best (eds.), Laboratory Phonology 8 (pp. 341-366). Mouton de Gruyter: New York.

Acquisition of sociophonetic markers

• Paul Foulkes, Gerard Docherty, and Dominic Watt (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language, 80, 177-206.
• Gerard J. Docherty, Paul Foulkes, J. Tillotson, and Dominic J. L. Watt (2006). On the scope of phonological learning: issues arising from socially structured variation. In Louis Goldstein, D. H. Whalen, and Catherine T. Best, eds. Laboratory Phonology 8, 393-421. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [Also see other papers on Paul Foulkes's publications page and on Gerry Docherty's
• Arvilla C. Payne (1980). Factors controlling the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by out-of-state children. In W. Labov (Ed.), Locating Language in Time and Space. New York: Academic Press, pp. 143-178. [Suggested by Morgan Sonderegger.]
• Julie Roberts (2002) Child language variation. In J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, eds., The handbook of language variation and change, pp. 333-348. Blackwell.
• Laura Koenig (2000). Laryngeal factors in voiceless consonant production in men, women, and 5-year-olds. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 1211-1228. [Suggested by Melinda Woodley.]
• Houri K. Vorperian, Shubing Wang, Moo K. Chung, E. Michael Schimek, Reid B. Durtschi, Ray D. Kent, Andrew J. Ziegert, and Lindell R. Gentry (2009). Anatomic development of the oral and pharyngeal portions of the vocal tract: An imaging study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125 (3), 1666-1678.
• Benjamin Munson (2009). Pathology or social indexing? To appear in Caroline Bowen, ed., Children's speech sound disorders. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. [preprint can be downloaded from Benjamin Munson's publications list on his home page.]
• Kari Urberg-Carlson and Benjamin Munson (2008). Gender typicality in children's speech 1: Breathiness and perceived sex typicality. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
• Benjamin Munson, Heather Bauer, and Alysse Zittnan (2008). Gender typicality in children's speech 2: Acoustic, structural, and perceptual correlates of gender typicality in children's oral narratives. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.

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Useful links

More links will be added here as we discover other web resources that are potentially relevant to the questions we are addressing together in this course.

• Click here to see the reading list and other materials for a seminar on phonological acquisition that was taught at Ohio State University in Spring 2006.
• Home page for CHILDES.
• Home page for Lou Boves's and Els den Os's Acquisition of Communication and Recognition Skills project site.
• Home page for Katherine Demuth's Child Language Lab at Brown.
• Home page for the paidologos project.
• Home page for Anne Fernald's Center for Infant Studies at Stanford University.
• Home page for Prahad Gupta's Language and Memory Lab at the University of Iowa.
• Susan Guion's publications page.
• Home page for Erika Hoff's Language Development Lab" has a large ongoing project on "Understanding Early Bilingualism" in which she and her colleagues are tracking very young children growing up in homes where Spanish and English are spoken, in different proportions by different family members.
• Barbara Kelly's staff profile page lists papers on the relationship between speech and gesture. [suggested by Tamara Sorenson Duncan]
• Home page (with many downloadable papers) for Lucie Ménard's Laboratoire de phonétique.
• Elena Nicolaidis's page of references on her work on gesturing in bilingual children. [suggested by Tamara Sorenson Duncan]
• Susan Rvachew's page with many references on her work relating perception and production in children with various atypical patterns speech and language acquisition.
• Melissa A. Redford's publications page.
• Home page for Janet Werker's Infant Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia.
• Home page for Marilyn Vihman's Infant and Toddler Studies lab and for a page with many downloadable recent references.

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