Internal and external influences on child language productions

Abstract

Over the past three decades, statistical approaches have been successfully used to explain how young language learners discriminate the sounds of their mother tongue(s), perceive and acquire linguistic categories (e.g. phonemes), and eventually develop their mental lexicon. In brief, input statistics, i.e. the relative frequency of the linguistic units that children are exposed to (e.g. phones, syllable types), appear to provide excellent predictors in the areas of infant speech perception and processing. This research offers useful insight into both the nature of the linguistic input that infants attend to and how they sort out the evidence from that input (see Gerken 2002 for a recent overview). Building on this success, a number of linguists have recently proposed statistical explanations for patterns of phonological productions that were traditionally accounted for through typological universals, representational complexity, grammatical constraints and constraint rankings, or lower-level perceptual and articulatory factors. For example, Levelt, Schiller and Levelt (1999/2000) have proposed, based on longitudinal data on the acquisition of Dutch, that the order of acquisition of syllable types (e.g. CV, CVC, CCV) can be predicted through the relative frequency of occurrence of these syllable types in the ambient language. Following a similar approach, Demuth and Johnson (2003) have proposed that a pattern of syllable truncation resulting in CV forms attested in a learner of French was triggered by the high frequency of the CV syllable type in this language. However, important questions need to be addressed before one can conclude that statistical approaches, or any mono-dimensional approach based on a single source of explanation, truly offer strong predictions for developmental production patterns. For example, one must wonder whether input statistics, which are mediated through the perceptual system and computed at the cognitive level, can have such an impact on production, given that production, itself influenced by the nature of phonological representations, (2009) François Pellegrino, Egidio Marsico, Ioana Chitoran & Christophe Coupé (eds.), Approaches to Phonological Complexity, 329-351. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Questioning the role of lexical contrastiveness in phonological development: Converging evidence from perception and production studies

“…Productivity of a given phone thus appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for its mastery within word productions (see also Sosa andStoel-Gammon 2006, 2012;Sosa 2013; and references therein for related discussion). These observations are in line with outcomes of other studies available in the literature, which generally fail to support usage frequency as the driving force behind phonological development in production, even though frequency pressures may at times push development patterns in particular directions (Kehoe and Lleó 2003, Demuth 2007, Edwards and Beckman 2008, Rose 2009, Ota and Green 2013, see also Brown 1973 for an early critical discussion of frequency-based explanations).…”

“…In line with Sosa andStoel-Gammon (2006, 2012) and Ota and Green (2013), our analyses show that the development of phonological abilities is largely independent of the number and types of contrasts that children represent in their lexicons. Further, we provide additional evidence, after Demuth (2007), Levelt and van Oostendorp (2007), Rose (2009), and Rose and Inkelas (2011), that usage frequency is also not a reliable predictor of the development of segmental productive abilities.…”

Chapter 2. Phonological categories and their manifestation in child phonology

“…Bybee 2001 for an exposition of this viewpoint), the integration of statistics with models of representation does raise a significant number of formal and empirical questions (e.g. Booij 2004;Rose 2009; see, also, Lieven 2010 and Ambridge & Lieven 2011 for similar considerations for other areas of grammatical organization).…”

Developmental perspectives on phonological typology and sound change

“…I would suggest that if infants have minimal evidence (in terms of a stochastic mechanism for category formation) (Johnson, 1997;Pierrehumbert, 2001;Maye et al, 2002) for an already acoustically weak contrast, which is then coupled with a low functional load (Martinet, 1933), they have the potential to affect misperception-based change (Greenlee and Ohala, 1980). This argument is further bolstered by the fact that in some children, production patterns suggest an effect of perception on early lexical representations (Macken, 1980;Rose, 2009).…”

“…Infants as young as 1 month have been shown to discriminate non-native contrasts that adults find difficult to discriminate (Eimas et al, 1971;Trehub, 1976). For example, Trehub (1976) While there is certainly a relationship between the frequency of occurrence and the emergence of certain phonological structures (see Levelt et al 1999;Demuth and Johnson 2003;Rose 2009), the relationship between accurate production of individual phones and the frequency of those phones in the ambient language of the child is less clear than the overall typological frequency across languages. Appendix A provides a table of the frequency of consonants in the Brent corpus of infant-directed speech (Brent and Siskind, 2001).…”