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Templates in phonological development| old_uid | 4915 |
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| title | Templates in phonological development |
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| start_date | 2008/05/26 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The study of child language must ultimately find a way to account for the developmental source of linguistic system. In one influential approach to this problem Universal Grammar (or UG) is assumed to provide the essential knowledge of linguistic structure that serves as the starting point for all language acquisition, leading to the basic question, what exactly needs to be learned? (Peperkamp, 2003). This must then be followed by the question of the nature of the triggering process needed to establish the specifics of a given language: How does the child recognize the critical data that will make it possible to set the appropriate parameters? For approaches that deny the existence of UG the questions are the converse: with what knowledge, if any, does the child begin?, followed by the complementary question, how can the child gain knowledge of linguistic structure or system? In this talk I will begin by reviewing the arguments for 'whole-word phonology', which I see as characterizing children's first phonological system (based on production data), and I will suggest learning mechanisms that might underlie such a system. Secondly, I will report preliminary findings from an ongoing study that puts those hypotheses to the test by investigating the relationship of phonological advance to lexical and grammatical learning in 'expressive late talkers' - children whose expressive language is 6 or more months behind at age 2.5 years (with normal comprehension). Our hypothesis is that the late talkers will fall into two groups, identifiable from their word production: (i) children who are slow to make a start but who show the same kind of sytematization in their word forms as is found in the typically developing children and (ii) children whose word production displays little evidence of systematization. The prediction is that in one-year follow-up recordings (not yet available for analysis) group (i) will have caught up with the typically developing children, showing normal linguistic levels for their age as assessed for phonology, morphosyntax and lexical diversity (based on spontaneous speech data) as well as in formal tests; in contrast, group (ii) will continue to show language delay and may be diagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). I will report on the procedure that we have developed to quantify and compare systematicity - a critical first step in testing our hypothesis. In addition, I will indicate the differences we are finding between the typically developing children, on the one hand, and the late talkers, on the other, who do appear to fall into the two groups that we were expecting to find. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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