Consonant clusters in child phonology and the directionality of syllable structure assignment

Lleó, Conxita; Prinz, Michael

doi:10.1017/s0305000900010084

Cited by 97 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We would accordingly predict that children should acquire CVCC syllables before CCVC syllables. The findings of Lleó and Prinz (1996) are in good agreement with this prediction.…”

Section: Predictions From the Modelsupporting

confidence: 87%

A Local Connectionist Account of Consonant Harmony in Child Language

Berg

Schade

2000

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study represents an attempt to sketch a processing model of phonological development in children acquiring their first language. The investigation is framed within a local connectionist network in which activation spreads between levels and inhibition within levels. Three ways are focused on in which an emergent processing system may diverge from a fully developed one-hypoactivation (too little activation due to underdeveloped links), hyperactivation (too much activation due to overloaded links) and impaired self-inhibition. With a view to determining how children's productions relate to these three "error mechanisms," one widespread phonological process, consonant harmony, is subjected to examination. Hypoactivation is found to capture the great majority of harmonic patterns. Hyperactivation and impaired self-inhibition play a more marginal role and are only needed to account for exceptional cases of harmony. The feasibility of the psycholinguistic model is demonstrated with the help of computer simulations that were run with noise on both fully developed and developing networks. The model makes a number of predictions including the claim that difficult sounds are acquired in coda positions first.

show abstract

“…We would accordingly predict that children should acquire CVCC syllables before CCVC syllables. The findings of Lleó and Prinz (1996) are in good agreement with this prediction.…”

Section: Predictions From the Modelsupporting

confidence: 87%

A Local Connectionist Account of Consonant Harmony in Child Language

Berg

Schade

2000

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…(Participant numbers correspond to those of the original reports. )A first law states that clusters imply affricates, but not vice versa (Gierut & O'Connor, 2002;Lleó & Prinz, 1996. Clusters are therefore marked and complex relative to affricates.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological Complexity and Language Learnability

Gierut

2007

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose-To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays.Method-The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language learning. Drawing from the literature, phonological complexity is defined from epistemic, ontological, and functional perspectives, with specific emphasis on the application of language universals in the selection of target sounds for treatment.Results-The cascading effects of phonological complexity on children's generalization learning are illustrated, and frequently asked questions about complexity in treatment are addressed. Conclusion-The role of complexity in cognitive development is introduced to demonstrate the apparent robustness of effects.Keywords linguistic complexity; phonological acquisition; treatment efficacy Children's acquisition of language occurs rapidly, with relatively few errors and seemingly without effort. In a matter of just about 36 months, a child typically produces novel sentences that involve complicated constructions, words that reference abstract ideas or absent entities, and sound sequences that mark the distinctive contrasts of the native language. In order to achieve this, a child must attend to the available input of the surrounding speech community (Morgan & Demuth, 1996). Linguistic input is thus the primary evidence for language learning, whether one views language as innately guided (Chomsky, 1999) or computationally derived (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987).Despite its importance, the linguistic input that a child receives is often variable, degraded, or even lacking in cues that would help to uncover the structure and organization of the language being learned (Gleitman & Newport, 2000). How then does a child use less-than-perfect input to guide language learning in extracting salient islands of information that are, in turn, revealing of linguistic structure? And importantly, for children with language delays, how can the input best be structured and presented in clinical treatment so as to facilitate the language learning process? These questions form the basis of learnability theory and its explicit focus on complexity as the trigger of language learning. In this article, complexity is examined within this broader theoretical context to best illustrate its clinical utility. This complements and extends prior discussions of the developmental and clinical factors that are associated with complexity (Gierut, 2001;Gierut, Morrisette, Hughes, & Rowland, 1996). The emphasis herein is on the phonological properties of language and their acquisition by children with functional Operational Definition of ComplexityComplexity has been the focus of study in a broad range of disciplines, including but not limited to linguistics (Dahl, 2004;Mohanan, 1992), cognitive and developmental psychology (Casti, 1994;Thelen & Smith, 1994), education (G...

show abstract

“…Thus, Spanish does not have native contrasts such as say-stay. In fact, Spanish uses an [e]-epenthesis rule (e.g., standard~estandar) to syllabify sclusters in initial position (Lleo & Prinz, 1996). It is possible, therefore, that the phonological constraint in Spanish listeners against initial st clusters may cause their perceptual processing of AE word-initial st clusters to be different from that of native AE listeners.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Differences in American English, Spanish, and monkey perception of thesay-stay trading relation

Sinnott

Saporita

2000

Perception & Psychophysics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An interesting phenomenon in human speech perception is the trading relation, in which two different acoustic cues both signal the same phonetic percept. The present study compared American English, Spanish, and monkey listeners in their perception of the trading relation between gap duration and Fl transition onset frequency in a synthetic say-stay continuum. For all the subjects, increased gap duration caused perception to change from say to stay; however, subjects differed in the extent to which the Fl cue traded with gap duration. For American English listeners, a change from a low to a high Fl onset caused a phoneme boundary shift of 26 msec toward shorter gap durations, indicating a strong trading relation. For Spanish listeners, the shift was significantly smaller at 13.7 msec, indicating a weaker trading relation. For monkeys, there was no shift at all, indicating no trading relation. These results provide evidence that the say-stay trading relation is dependent on perceptual learning from linguistic exposure.There is currently much interest in determining the basis for trading relations in human speech perception. A trading relation is a phenomenon in which two different acoustic cues signal the same phonetic percept. Within limits, the cues trade with one another along a synthetic speech continuum-that is, the value ofone cue may be increased while the value of the other is decreased, yet the phonetic percept remains the same for the listener. For example, one ofthe first trading relations to be studied in detail was that between voice onset time (VaT, a temporal cue) and Fl onset frequency (a spectral cue) as perceived by American English (AE) listeners: As the Fl onset frequency increases (decreases) in a synthetic VaT continuum, more voiceless (voiced) stimuli are perceived, thus shifting the phoneme boundary toward lower (higher) values of VaT (Summerfield & Haggard, 1977).What causes a trading relation? The most parsimonious explanation is that the effect is due to generalized psychoacoustic mechanisms that are innate and immutable in all normal listeners and, thus, independent oflanguage learning (e.g., Kluender & Lotto, 1994). A second possibility is that trading relations are due to perceptual learning from linguistic exposure, including articulatory processes (e.g., Best, 1995 nisms are not necessarily mutually exclusive, however, and it is likely that trading relations, as well as other aspects of speech perception, implicate both innate and learned mechanisms that interact to varying degrees (see, e.g., Pisoni, Lively, & Logan, 1994).There are several ways in which the relative contributions of psychoacoustic versus perceptual learning processes in speech perception could be evaluated. First, we can compare the perception of native and nonnative listeners. Differences would obviously support a perceptuallearning component, because there is no reason to expect psychoacoustic differences in sensitivity between native and nonnative listeners. Second, we can compare the perception ofnative list...

show abstract

Consonant clusters in child phonology and the directionality of syllable structure assignment

Cited by 97 publications

References 17 publications

A Local Connectionist Account of Consonant Harmony in Child Language

A Local Connectionist Account of Consonant Harmony in Child Language

Phonological Complexity and Language Learnability

Differences in American English, Spanish, and monkey perception of thesay-stay trading relation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About