Course Syllabus
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Class Notes|
Anne-Michelle Tessier Linguistics Department, University of Alberta amtessier at ualberta dot ca |
"Don't fall asleep in the front row. I can't handle that kind of rejection." [Professor Tager, History 387: Modern Boston. from the UMass Amherst Daily Jolt Quote Archive] |
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Course Syllabus |
Class Mainpage |
Presentation Schedule |
Class Notes |
| Oct 1 |
Tara is fairly anachronistically presenting Fernald 1985.
1. Is the lexical information as interesting to infants as the acoustic information provided in ‘motherese’? 2. What exactly are the universal speech properties that infants’ find interesting? 3. Is an infant’s preference for ‘motherese’ based on a previous experience/familiarity with it? Here are the presentation slides
1. Is it enough to describe unmarkedness of coda consonants just with ‘Coronal’ and ‘Sonorant’? Perhaps adding more parameters into it makes UG more predictive? 2. The authors might have overlooked the coda errors caused by deletion (i.e. CVC -> CV) and insertion (i.e. CVC -> CV.CV). Do you think this is crucial to their statistic results and conclusion? 3. Do the children actually master unmarked (coda) consonants faster than more marked ones even if the latter have a higher frequency? The speed of acquiring a sound may not be obvious from the overall correct rate of production. |
| OCt 4 |
Christine is presenting Kirk and Demuth 2005.
1. What if this study were run in another language? 2. What about word-medial consonant clusters? 3. Would the results have been any different if the study had been done with a narrower age range of children? |
| OCt 6 |
Ivan is presenting from Chambless 2006.
1. Would word-initial CCs exhibit an increased degree of faithfulness as word-medial CCs when produced immediately following words with iambic (wS) stress? 2. How might researchers have come to a more solid conclusion about SSP v. *ADJUNCT constraints in terms of their effect on word-initial CC reduction? In other words, how could they have taken their research further? 3. Does the ordering of the two consonants of a medial consonant cluster affect deletion, irrespective of the identity of the individual consonant? Chambless puts forth this possibility when she describes the competing hypothesis of the “positional faithfulness constraint.” What sort of experiment could allow researchers to characterize such a possible “positional faithfulness constraint”? |
| Oct 13 |
Paula is presenting Kehoe 2000.
1.Only 4 of the 38 children display a size restriction. How can this be further investigated? 2.Why analyze imitated productions? 3.Previous support for the prosodic structure account comes from English and Dutch. To what extent does the prosodic structure account hold cross-linguistically? |
| Oct 15 |
Danielle is presenting Ota 2006.
1. In this study, children’s productions were analyzed in terms of syllable and weight. Given that Japanese children develop a sensitivity very early on to moraic structure (Ota, 2003), is Ota still accurate in discussing and analyzing their production in terms of syllables and not mora? 2. In this study’s analysis, words were divided by three parameters, number of syllables, syllable weight, and accent, which sometimes resulted in very small prosodic categories, some with only one or two tokens. Given the in-depth statistical analysis Ota used for this study, can the results be accurate for all the categories? 3. Ota raises the possibility that there is an earlier stage that this study missed, where all longer target words are truncated to the most frequent prosodic structures. What is the evidence for this stage, and how does this affect Ota’s conclusions? |
| Oct 18 |
Kaitlin is presenting Carter and Gerken 2003.
1) What would evidence of an acoustic trace mean in analysis of different stages of acquisition? Or within different populations? For example, in the telegraphic speech stage where functional words are omitted. 2) Does this data support a theory of SLI as a delay in language learning or disordered language learning? What data could help us clarify this issue? 3) What would happen if we looked at other developing children cross-linguistically? And where would we have to look to find these comparisons? |
| Oct 29 |
Ross is presenting Macken 1980. Here are the presentation slides
1. Are there other factor related to the child’s active systematization or organization of phonology and what might they be? 2. MacKen indicates that it is dangerous to generalize from the evidence of discrimination in a few cases to the conclusion that the child can discriminate all instances of a contrast,. To what extent is it dangerous to generalize from one child’s data to all children’s phonology? 3. What other factors (such as socioeconomic status of the family in which the child is born) might influence the results of a study of this nature and how might these factors be overcome? |
| Nov 5 |
Amber is presenting Schwartz and Leonard (1982) Here are the presentation slides
1. According to Menn the cognitively based proposals suggest that children do not avoid certain words, but instead simply fail to select them. How would one make a distinction between failing to select and avoiding? How could one test failure-to-select ? avoidance? 2. The age range of the children was selected to ensure that at the conclusion of the investigation the children would still be within a period when selection continues to occur. What could be expected if the children had crossed the fifty word stage while in the process of the investigation? 3. The subjects were selected from middle-class homes. In what way is this a significant or an arbitrary control? Tsung-Ying is presenting Swingley (2003). Here are the presentation slides
1.Is it enough to make the conclusion by testing just one single segment in each experiment? If children retains phonetic details completely, shouldn’t we test the discrimination of every segment in the stimuli? 2.Does the phonotactic distribution help the children to identify the sound contrasts? For example, in English, none of baby, pig, beckon, happy, brush, and pickles can form minimal-pairs, but they show a /b/-/p/-/k/ onset contrast. 3. Is it possible that these children ‘watch’ too many English TV shows and learn/hear some minimal-pair words from them? James is presenting Werker et al (2002).
1) Are the post hoc results enough to convince us that vocabulary-size determines the children’s ability to distinguish the minimal differences? 2) Would we expect the same results in cross-linguistic studies? What about languages that have more instances of phonetically similar words? 3) What kind of results would we expect from experiments with longer words? |
| Nov 10 |
Josh is presenting Berko Gleason 1958.
1.What if this study were done on a much more morphological language (such as our good friend Totonac)? Would we expect children at this age to have the same degree of knowledge about their L1’s morphology? Or is English morphology just easier to learn? 2)What if this study were done on L2 English learners? Would we expect them to yield similar results or would they experience more difficulty? (i.e. Does the so-called “perceptual magic” that children have play a role in learning morphology as well?) 3)What if we ran this study on middle or lower-class children? Does one’s level or quality of education play a role in learning morphology? |
| Nov 17 |
Dane is presenting Broselow et al 1998. (Questions were on the handout...) |
| Nov 29 |
Vanessa is presenting Goldstein 2005. Here are the presentation slides
2. Would methods have to be altered when studying a dialect that does not weaken or delete syllable final consonants? (/s/ &/n/) 3. Is there a characteristic within language types/groups that allow studies like this to be more generalized and widely applicable? |
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