It has long been noted that children tend to omit syllables in their early speech. Although several proposals have been made as to why this occurs, none accurately captures either the English or crosslinguistic data, nor do they provide a developmental account for how children's early word shapes change over time. In contrast, a statistically and phonologically grounded perspective on these issues, employing insights from Prosodic Phonology and Optimality Theory along with consideration of the input, achieves better empirical coverage of the data. It also provides a more theoretically coherent understanding for why children omit the syllables (or parts of syllables) they do, how children eventually arrive at more adult-like speech productions, and the implications this holds for the emergence of grammatical function morphemes. The main focus of the project is to provide a coherent developmental theory of early prosodic phonology and morphology. The languages to be investigated are English and French - languages with very different prosodic and morphological structures. The study has three goals: The first goal is to conduct longitudinal case studies of 12 children's spontaneous speech productions from the onset of speech until around 3 years of age. The second goal is to design a set of linguistically sophisticated experimental procedures designed to test children's level of prosodic development. The experiments will be administered to both cross-sectional and longitudinal subjects. Both sets of data will be subject to fine-grained linguistic analysis, supplemented with acoustic analysis, of children's early speech productions at the level of Syllables, Feet, Prosodic Words, and Phonological Phrases. The third goal is to address the behavioral data from a quantitative perspective within Optimality Theory. This will be carried out by evaluating statistical variation in the data using both stochasitically ranked constraints and conditional exponential models. The longitudinal data, experimental tools and statistical methods developed will be invaluable for future study of both normal and language impaired populations, and will break new ground in exploring quantitative approaches to language variation.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH060922-04
Application #
6754392
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-3 (01))
Program Officer
Wagner, Ann
Project Start
2001-06-01
Project End
2006-05-31
Budget Start
2004-06-01
Budget End
2005-05-31
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2004
Total Cost
$279,146
Indirect Cost
Name
Brown University
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
001785542
City
Providence
State
RI
Country
United States
Zip Code
02912
Song, Jae Yung; Demuth, Katherine; Morgan, James (2018) Input and Processing Factors Affecting Infants' Vocabulary Size at 19 and 25 Months. Front Psychol 9:2398
Sundara, Megha; Demuth, Katherine; Kuhl, Patricia K (2011) Sentence-position effects on children's perception and production of English third person singular -s. J Speech Lang Hear Res 54:55-71
Song, Jae Yung; Demuth, Katherine; Morgan, James (2010) Effects of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech on infant word recognition. J Acoust Soc Am 128:389-400
Demuth, Katherine; McCullough, Elizabeth (2009) The longitudinal development of clusters in French. J Child Lang 36:425-48
Yung Song, Jae; Sundara, Megha; Demuth, Katherine (2009) Phonological constraints on children's production of English third person singular -s. J Speech Lang Hear Res 52:623-42
Demuth, Katherine; McCullough, Elizabeth (2009) The prosodic (re)organization of children's early English articles. J Child Lang 36:173-200
Song, Jae Yung; Demuth, Katherine (2008) Compensatory vowel lengthening for omitted coda consonants: a phonetic investigation of children's early representations of prosodic words. Lang Speech 51:385-402
Demuth, Katherine; Tremblay, Annie (2008) Prosodically-conditioned variability in children's production of French determiners. J Child Lang 35:99-127
Kirk, Cecilia (2008) Substitution errors in the production of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters. J Speech Lang Hear Res 51:35-48
Demuth, Katherine; Culbertson, Jennifer; Alter, Jennifer (2006) Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English. Lang Speech 49:137-74

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