An Emergence Approach to Speech Acquisition
An Emergence Approach to Speech Acquisition

Author: Barbara L. Davis

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-07-24

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1135067775

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The central assertion in this volume is that the young child uses general skills, scaffolded by adults, to acquire the complex knowledge of sound patterns and the goal-directed behaviors for communicating ideas through language and producing speech. A child’s acquisition of phonology is seen as a product of her physical and social interaction capacities supported by input from adult models about ambient language sound patterns. Acquisition of phonological knowledge and behavior is a product of this function-oriented complex system. No pre-existing mental knowledge base is necessary for acquiring phonology in this view. Importantly, the child’s diverse abilities are used for many other functions as well as phonological acquisition. Throughout, an evaluation is made of the research on patterns of typical development across languages in monolingual and bilingual children and children with speech impairments affecting various aspects of their developing complex system. Also considered is the status of available theoretical perspectives on phonological acquisition relative to an emergence proposal, and contributions that this perspective could make to more comprehensive modeling of the nature of phonological acquisition are proposed. The volume will be of interest to cognitive psychologists, linguistics, and speech pathologists.

An Emergence Approach to Speech Acquisition
An Emergence Approach to Speech Acquisition

Author: Barbara Lockett Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 9780203375303

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The central assertion in this volume is that the young child uses general skills, scaffolded by adults, to acquire the complex knowledge of sound patterns and the goal-directed behaviors for communicating ideas through language and producing speech. A child's acquisition of phonology is seen as a product of her physical and social interaction capacities supported by input from adult models about ambient language sound patterns. Acquisition of phonological knowledge and behavior is a product of this function-oriented complex system. No pre-existing mental knowledge base is necessary for acquiring phonology in this view. Importantly, the child's diverse abilities are used for many other functions as well as phonological acquisition. Throughout, an evaluation is made of the research on patterns of typical development across languages in monolingual and bilingual children and children with speech impairments affecting various aspects of their developing complex system. Also considered is the status of available theoretical perspectives on phonological acquisition relative to an emergence proposal, and contributions that this perspective could make to more comprehensive modeling of the nature of phonological acquisition are proposed. The volume will be of interest to cognitive psychologists, linguistics, and speech pathologists.

The Handbook of Language Emergence
The Handbook of Language Emergence

Author: Brian MacWhinney

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 651

ISBN-13: 1119075386

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This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm. Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever

Motor Aspects of the Emergence of Oral Gestures for Speech
Motor Aspects of the Emergence of Oral Gestures for Speech

Author: Hermien Dina Diepstra

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Emergence approaches to speech acquisition consider speech development as a dynamic process in which the body's actions play a crucial role in the acquisition of phonological knowledge. This assumption is rooted in the hypothesis that the phylogenetic origin of speech lies in oral behaviors for feeding (e.g., smacking, chewing, and sucking). This dissertation investigates motor aspects of emergent speech from a dynamic systems approach in real-time, developmental time and across motor systems. Specifically, it examines contrasting predictions from Articulatory Phonology and Frame-then-Content theory regarding articulator control in early babbling. Infants aged 6 and 8 months were presented with an audiovisual presentation of an adult model producing lip smacks and tongue smacks. The 8-month-old infants exhibited more lip gestures than tongue gestures following adult lip smacks and more tongue gestures than lip gestures following adult tongue-tip smacks. This finding implies that 8-month-old infants are capable of producing goal-directed oral gestures by matching the articulatory organ of an adult model, which is consistent with predictions from Articulatory Phonology. The 6-month-old infants provided no evidence of significant differential responding. Instead, they showed bouts of complex oral movements involving lips and tongue, which resembled ingestive behaviors. This developmental pattern seems homologous with the development of lip smacking in monkeys, supporting the contention that speech developed from rhythmic facial expressions in phylogeny. Besides oral responses, the infants also showed manual responses to the oral gesture presentations. Compared to a baseline condition, infants increased their rate of rhythmic oral and manual (hand and arm) movements during the presentation of rhythmic oral gestures, with older infants exhibiting a higher rate of rhythmic movement events than younger infants. The findings strengthen claims of linkage between the motor systems underlying rhythmic oral and manual behavior in infancy. Overall, the results contribute to the advancement of theory on speech production and offer new directions for the investigation of precursors of speech.

The Influence of Child-Directed Speech on Children’s First Language Acquisition
The Influence of Child-Directed Speech on Children’s First Language Acquisition

Author: Jessica Schadow

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2014-10-27

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13: 365682391X

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: First Language Acquisition, language: English, abstract: “Language Acquisition represents, perhaps, the most impressive achievement in human development. This is all the more fascinating since this process is quite rapid, and the successive stages for the progressive acquisition of the native language follow a quite similar chronology across languages.” (Dominey et al. 2004: 122) What the linguist Peter Dominey here states describes people’s fascination about language, specifically language acquisition. Both are highly complex frameworks whose investigation, indeed, can be regarded as an inexhaustible enterprise. Nevertheless, research has been willing to face that challenge, and, over several decades, linguists have been trying to find out how exactly children acquire their native language. Children all over the world, regardless of language and culture, eventually acquire their mother tongue. However, the question how exactly children learn language has not been answered unanimously. One of the interesting observations in language is that adults change their speech while talking to children – a phenomenon referred to as Child-Directed Speech (CDS). Why does this adjustment take place? Changing one’s own speech in conversation with children seems to occur quite intuitively and can be observed in any situation of everyday life in which adults and children are involved. Due to the examination of cross-cultural issues in my minor bachelor studies and given my personal interest in other cultures, I attach high importance to the consideration of cultural differences when investigating children’s first language acquisition. Moreover, it not only seems to be highly interesting but also indispensable to link theoretical aspects with practical relevance and vice versa: Ongoing general discussions about upbringing and education have revealed the high social relevance of this subject. Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine the influence of CDS on children’s first language acquisition. This will be accomplished by linking theoretical linguistic theory with empirical findings from different fields of research.

The Emergence of the Speech Capacity
The Emergence of the Speech Capacity

Author: D. Kimbrough Oller

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 1135684960

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Recent studies of vocal development in infants have shed new light on old questions of how the speech capacity is founded and how it may have evolved in the human species. Vocalizations in the very first months of life appear to provide previously unrecognized clues to the earliest steps in the process by which language came to exist and the processes by which communicative disorders arise. Perhaps the most interesting sounds made by infants are the uniquely human 'protophones' (loosely, 'babbling'), the precursors to speech. Kimbrough Oller argues that these are most profitably interpreted in the context of a new infrastructural model of speech. The model details the manner in which well-formed speech units are constructed, and it reveals how infant vocalizations mature through the first months of life by increasingly adhering to the rules of well-formed speech. He lays out many advantages of an infrastructural approach. Infrastructural interpretation illuminates the significance of vocal stages, and highlights clinically significant deviations, such as the previously unnoticed delays in vocal development that occur in deaf infants. An infrastructural approach also specifies potential paths of evolution for vocal communicative systems. Infrastructural properties and principles of potential communicative systems prove to be organized according to a natural logic--some properties and principles naturally presuppose others. Consequently some paths of evolution are likely while others can be ruled out. An infrastructural analysis also provides a stable basis for comparisons across species, comparisons that show how human vocal capabilities outstrip those of their primate relatives even during the first months of human infancy. The Emergence of the Speech Capacity will challenge psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, and primatologists alike to rethink the ways they categorize and describe communication. Oller's infraphonological model permits provocative reconceptualizations of the ways infant vocalizations progress systematically toward speech, insightful comparisons between speech and the vocal systems of other species, and fruitful speculations about the origins of language.

The Emergence of Language
The Emergence of Language

Author: Brian MacWhinney

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 1135676917

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For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin. This book presents a series of emergentist accounts of language acquisition. Each case shows how a few simple, basic processes give rise to new levels of language complexity. The aspects of language examined here include auditory representations, phonological and articulatory processes, lexical semantics, ambiguity processing, grammaticality judgment, and sentence comprehension. The approaches that are invoked to account formally for emergent patterns include neural network theory, dynamic systems, linguistic functionalism, construction grammar, optimality theory, and statistically-driven learning. The excitement of this work lies both in the discovery of new emergent patterns and in the integration of theoretical frameworks that can formalize the theory of emergentism.

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children
Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children

Author: Sharynne McLeod

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2012-02-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1847695159

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Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. The 30 chapters have been written by 44 authors from 16 different countries about 112 languages and dialects. The book is designed to translate research into clinical practice. It is divided into three sections: (1) Foundations, (2) Multilingual speech acquisition, (3) Speech-language pathology practice. An introductory chapter discusses cross-linguistic and multilingual aspects of speech sound disorders in children. Subsequent chapters address speech sound acquisition, how the disorder manifests in different languages, cultural contexts, and speakers, and addresses diagnosis, assessment and intervention. The research chapters synthesize available research across a wide range of languages. A unique feature of this book are the chapters that translate research into clinical practice. These chapters provide real-life vignettes for specific geographical or linguistic contexts.