Annemarie Kerkhoff

Bempen or Bemben: Differences Between Children At-Risk of Dyslexia and Children With SLI on a Morpho-Phonological Task

This study assesses morpho-phonological alternation in plural formation by 5-year-old Dutch children with a familial risk of dyslexia, children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing children. The morpho-phonological process investigated is the voicing alternation in Dutch singular–plural pairs such as bed [t] ‘bed’ ~ bedden [d] ‘beds’. Results on a plural formation task showed that the at-risk group, like the control group, produced more correct plurals in real words than the SLI group, and was sensitive to lexical frequency. However, the at-risk group patterned with the SLI group on nonword stimuli, repeating fewer correct singulars and producing fewer plurals. The SLI groups performance was further characterized by production difficulties affecting clusters, difficulties with morphological inflection, and possibly reduced sensitivity to lexical frequency and distributional patterns. These findings support the phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia and suggest that dyslexia and SLI should be considered separate disorders.

Phonotactics and morphophonology in early child language: Evidence from Dutch

This research investigates childrens knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtən] (cap~caps) but does in [bɛt]~[bɛdən] (bed~beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [kɛtən]~[kɛt] and [kɛdən]~[kɛt]). Results indicated that childrens performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition.

Lost and Found: Decline and Reemergence of Non-Native Vowel Discrimination in the First Year of Life

ABSTRACT Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same phoneme, or a token from another phonemic category. Habituation involved tokens of multiple speakers. Infants were tested on a native (/aː/-/eː/) and non-native (/ɛ/-/æ/) contrast. The 6-month-olds (n = 38), 8-month-olds (n = 44) and 10-month-olds (n = 35) discriminated the native contrast. The non-native contrast was discriminated by the group of 6-month-olds (n = 42) but not the 8-month-olds (n = 47), in line with PA. However, the 10-month-olds (n = 39) also showed discrimination. We conclude that discrimination of phonetic categories can occur after perceptual attunement; discrimination performance is sensitive to tasks applied.