First language acquisition and phonological change

One of the longest-standing maxims of linguistic thought is that children’s language provides a source for language change. In a very early discussion of acquisition, Schleicher (1861) notes parallels between children’s errors and diachronic changes in a range of languages. For example, his three year old son Ernst

From phonetics to phonology : The emergence of first words in Italian

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0; 9 or 0; 10 to 2;0-two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of consonant variegation in babble, are found to predict rate of lexical advance and to relate to the form of the early words. In addition, each child's lexical profile is analyzed to test the hypothesis of non-linearity in phonological development. All of the children show the expected pattern of phonological advance: 'Relatively accurate first word production is followed by lexical expansion, characterized by a decrease in accuracy and an increase of similarity between word forms. We interpret such a profile as reflecting the emergence of word templates, a first step in phonological organization

Prosodic structures and templates in bilingual phonological development

Bilingual children have long been held to have ‘separate linguistic systems’ from the start (e.g., Meisel, 2001). This paper challenges that assumption with data from five bilingual children’s first 100 words. Whereas the prosodic structures represented by a child’s words may or may not be differentiated by language, emergent phonological templates are not, the same patterns being deployed as more complex adult word forms are targeted in each language. Reliance on common (idiosyncratic) phonological templates for the two languages is ascribed to children’s experience with their own voice (in production) as well as with others’ speech. Both experimental studies and spontaneous cross-linguistic speech errors in adults and older children are cited to support the view that, for a bilingual, unconscious processing draws on both languages throughout the lifespan, which suggests that the emphasis on ‘separate systems’ (from the start or thereafter) may be misconceived

Learning words and learning sounds : Advances in language development

Phonological development is sometimes seen as a process of learning sounds, or forming phonological categories, and then combining sounds to build words, with the evidence taken largely from studies demonstrating ‘perceptual narrowing’ in infant speech perception over the first year of life. In contrast, studies of early word production have long provided evidence that holistic word learning may precede the formation of phonological categories. In that account, children begin by matching their existing vocal patterns to adult words, with knowledge of the phonological system emerging from the network of related word forms. Here I review evidence from production and then consider how the implicit and explicit learning mechanisms assumed by the complementary memory systems model might be understood as reconciling the two approaches

Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and English-Welsh bilingual infants

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered

The acquisition of demonstratives in a complex noun class system

We present an exploratory study of 2 to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369-3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps

Linguistic Advance and Cognitive Style in Language Acquisition

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 386-40