When a child acquires a language, they must make sense of the language they hear around them. But this language is not always the same - it varies from speaker to speaker and situation to situation. Different people the child hears speak differently, and his/her mother will also use different kinds of language when playing or disciplining him/her. Professors Suzanne Curtin and Scott Kiesling of the University of Pittsburgh and Lori Holt of Carnegie Mellon University are linguists and psychologists who are exploring how children manage to organize speech sounds in their minds, and why they end up speaking the way they do. How much influence do caregivers have in this process? Researchers know from previous studies that children do not reproduce their parents' accent exactly, but that their parents' accent usually does make a difference in how they talk. It has also been observed that children of parents who have foreign accents are sometimes not aware that their parents speak differently from native speakers. What aspects of the child's accent are influenced by the caregiver, and what are determined by other forces (especially peers), and at what age? Understanding how individual children develop their own unique speech pattern will provide a greater understanding of the role of the language that children hear in shaping how they acquire language. Most research in this area has compared the speech produced by adults and children who have parents from different language backgrounds. This study explores how children perceive the language they hear around them, how they represent it in their minds, and how that knowledge changes as they mature.
Vowels are more likely to be pronounced differently in dialects than other speech sounds, even in the same speaker. For example, the way someone from Chicago says the vowel in "hat" is noticeable to someone from Tennessee, but there are no differences in the consonants between these two cities. Since vowels are more variable in pronunciation, and are also more easily measured with phonetic equipment, we focus on how children perceive vowel differences. First, children 6 to 24 months will be tested to see whether they can hear different ways of pronouncing the vowel in the word 'hay,' and in the word 'hoe.' In a second experiment, children are tested to see if they prefer one way of pronouncing the 'hoe' vowel over another instance. Methods to record children in naturalistic interaction with same-age children will be tested, as will methods to record interactions with a caregiver. These methods will help determine how children sort out all the variable information they receive in the speech around them and come up with their own way of speaking, and will be used in a future study that will follow children from infancy to school-age.
