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Learning sounds and words. Evidence from children’s perception and production| old_uid | 11803 |
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| title | Learning sounds and words. Evidence from children’s perception and production |
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| start_date | 2012/11/12 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle D 328 |
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| summary | In this talk I will present an overview of several studies we have carried out in the Baby Research Center in Nijmegen to study the acquisition of various phonological contrasts by Dutch children, using evidence from infant speech perception, word recognition and word production in the second and third year of life.
One important asymmetry that has caused major misunderstandings in the field of phonological acquisition is the gap between children’s knowledge as displayed in perception experiments and the knowledge children bring to the task of language production. For example, while children by the end of their first year of life show knowledge of the sound system of their native language (they seem to know the speech sounds of their language, its phonotactics, stress pattern, etc.), it takes them quite some time before they show that same knowledge in their own productions. Infant speech perception researchers have therefore claimed that perception research provides a better way of tapping children’s grammatical knowledge.
The situation is even more complex: Infants show improved sensitivity to native language contrasts in their first year of life (e.g., Kuhl et al. 2006). However, they show decreased sensitivity to the same contrasts in word-learning experiments in the beginning of the second year of life (e.g., Stager & Werker 1997), although they are still able to discriminate these contrasts in other tasks. This suggests that next to the discrimination of sound contrasts in the pre-lexical stage, in the lexical stage of development another level of perception develops which ignores many phonetic details. We assume that discrimination is based on phonetic properties while word comprehension involves matching those properties to stored phonological representations of words in the mental lexicon. The reduced sensitivity to certain contrasts in word learning might be caused by the nature of early lexical phonological representations.
On the assumption that children use the same lexical phonological representations for word comprehension and word production, we expect to find similar problems in both areas: contrasts that are difficult in comprehension (and hence affect their representation) should also cause problems in production. We show that this is indeed the case. Under such an account there are no major asymmetries between perception and production: both are tightly connected. |
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| responsibles | Soare, Ferret |
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