Diane Frome Loeb

Attempted Sounds Are Sometimes Not: An Expanded View of Phonological Selection and Avoidance.

Young children readily acquire new words with consonants and syllable structures already used accurately (IN words). They have more difficulty acquiring new words with consonants or syllable structures never before produced or attempted (OUT words). In the present study, we examined childrens acquisition of a third type of word, containing consonants the children had attempted in the past but never produced accurately (ATTEMPTED words). IN, OUT and ATTEMPTED words and their object referents were presented to 11 young children in a series of play sessions. The childrens production and comprehension of the words were then assessed. No comprehension differences among the three types of words were observed. However, ATTEMPTED words as well as OUT words were less likely to be acquired in production than IN words. Some revisions in models of child phonology are proposed to accommodate these findings.

Specific language impairment and parameter theory

A parameter theory of language learning was applied to data from eight specifically-language-impaired children in an attempt to determine whether a single factor might be responsible for a large cluster of these childrens errors. The results failed to support the hypothesis that these childrens difficulties were associated with a delayed resetting of the null subject parameter. These findings are compared to findings from studies involving other language learning theories.

Some conditions that promote unusual phonological behaviour in children

Although unusual phonological patterns vary in frequency and type across children, collectively they constitute a sizeable minority of the available data on child phonology, and, as a consequence, warrant serious study. In this investigation three types of novel words were presented to children in an effort to determine the conditions that promote unusual productions. For a group of young normally-developing children, unusual productions were more likely to occur when the novel words contained consonants the children had neither produced nor attempted in the past. A smaller group of specifically-language-impaired children did not show the same type of behaviour. In contrast, these children exhibited a generally higher percentage of unusual productions that seemed independent of the childrens prior experience with the sounds in the words. Although neither groups phonological behaviour reflected efficient use of the phonetic regularities in the language, the specifically-language-impaired children seemed ...

Language characteristics of a linguistically precocious child

This study investigated the language skills of a two-year-old child who displayed apparently advanced communication skills. Analysis of 1,258 child utterances in relation to surrounding discourse structures indicated a high functioning level of contingent forms (retrieved forms). Utterances that contained retrieved forms displayed a higher index of language abilities than utterances that lacked such forms. This type of contingent speech elevated language abilities by the manipulation of discourse features.

Comparison of pitch reset characteristics between children’s filler syllable and starter syllable productions

Children’s filler syllables may assist in maintaining rhythmic envelopes and intonational phrasing, and may be markers of potential or actual morphosyntactic information. Therefore, they should exhibit pitch characteristics indicating coherence with other constituents in the same intonational phrase. They contrast with starter syllables, which serve more pragmatic functions such as discourse place holders. An acoustical analysis of pitch reset is presented which distinguishes between filler and starter productions. Pitch reset was evaluated through two measures: the difference in intensity (decibels) between syllable initiation and syllable termination, and boundary duration (milliseconds) from the offset of the targeted syllable to the onset of the next syllable or constituent. Results demonstrated that fillers and starters could be differentiated using pitch reset measures. Typically, fillers did not exhibit pitch reset, described here as a boundary duration less than 200 ms and intensity difference sco...

Acoustic phonetic features of young children's potential homophones

Homophones are different words that sound alike, e.g., “bear” and “bare.” Since young children can often hear differences they cannot speak, they may produce homophones for words they know to be different. Thus, for example, a child may hear that “bike” and “bite” are different, but if s/he cannot yet produce word‐final consonants, s/he may utter both as /bai/. Two questions presently under investigation are: (1) Do young children actively seek to include or exclude such potential homophones in their early vocabulary? (2) Do children faced with such potential homophones produce subtle, subphonemic differences between them? This paper reports the results of a study aimed at answering the second of these two questions. Nine 20‐month‐old normally developing, English‐speaking childrens utterances were tape recorded for acoustic analysis. These utterances were produced in situations in which homophones were likely to result from (a) reduction of initial consonant clusters, (b) stopping of initial fricatives, ...