Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Phonological development by children with typical and atypical speech-sound development: The acquisition (or not) of a (really) complex system

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Joint presentation by Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Friday, October 24, 2008 at 1:00 pm -3:00 pm
Room 500, Cancer Pavilion, Life Sciences Complex 1160 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Jan Edwards is a research scientist and Professor of Communicative Disorders at the Waisman Centre, UW-Madison. Dr. Benjamin Munson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Abstract

In the first few years of life, most children learn to talk, whether they are learning to speak English, or Korean, or both, and whether they live in a middle class American English home where mothers engage in intense interaction with the children using a special emphatic speech style that stresses nouns and labeling, or in a Korean home, where the analogous infant-directed speech style instead emphasizes verbs and the actions that verbs name. Perhaps because of this rapid development, the traditional view of phonological development has posited that developmental changes in productions patterns is the result of a largely automatic and autonomous process in which children move from a relatively universal phonological constraints to ones tailored to the ambient language.

Such a view of phonological development makes many assumptions: for example, it assumes that children’s phonological learning is best described in terms of alphabetic transcription and that patterns of phonological development are similar across different languages. It also predicts that phonological disorders can be best characterized by deficits in abstract phonological knowledge. In this talk, we will present analyses of data from two projects in support of a more nuanced view of phonological development. The first of these is from the paidologos project (ling.osu.edu…). The paidologos project is a cross-linguistic examination of first-language phonological development across a number of languages, including American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, and Mandarin. The second is a project that examined phonological knowledge deficits in children with phonological disorders. Throughout the talk, we will argue that phonological knowledge is a complex system that involves many different levels of representation. The child’s task, as a language learner, is to learn these different levels and the mappings among them. Moreover, deficits in each of these types of knowledge lead to qualitatively different speech and language impairments. [Supported by NIDCD grant R01 DC02932 and NSF grant BCS-0729140 to Jan Edwards, and by NIDCD Grant R03 DC005702 and NSF grant BCS- 0729277 to Benjamin Munson]