Sari Kunnari

The functions of maternal verbal responses to prelinguistic infants as predictors of early communicative and linguistic development

Maternal overall verbal responsiveness to prelinguistic infants at 0;10 was analysed by categorizing responses according to their function. In addition, the predictive validity of the response categories to the child’s communicative and linguistic development at 1;0 was examined. The participants were 27 Finnish-speaking mothers and their first-born infants. The results indicated several predictive relations between the functions of maternal verbal responses and child communicative and linguistic development, while maternal overall verbal responsiveness seemed to imply aspects of verbal style only modestly. Child contributions that may account for relationships between maternal interaction and child linguistic development were also considered. The results are discussed with reference to maternal interactional sensitivity.

Utterance-final lengthening and quantity in Northern Finnish

Abstract Utterance-final lengthening in Northern Finnish was investigated using tightly controlled laboratory materials, with particular focus on its interaction with the languages single (short) vs. double (long) vowel distinction. Like many other languages, Finnish exhibited utterance-final lengthening, although the estimates of magnitudes of lengthening on final vowels varied greatly depending on the treatment of the utterance-final breathy/voiceless portion of the vowel. As has been also shown for other languages, the lengthening occurred as early as the stressed, penultimate syllable of disyllabic words and was generally progressive. Crucially, vowel quantity interacted with the lengthening in a manner consistent with a hypothesis that Finnish regulates utterance-final lengthening to preserve its quantity system. Specifically, the voiced portion (the portion that is relevant to the perception of vowel quantity) of the longest single vowel (the half-long vowel) was restricted. Additionally, double vowels were lengthened less when the vowel in an adjacent syllable was also double, suggesting syntagmatic constraints. Our results support the view that utterance-final lengthening is a universal tendency but is implemented in language-specific ways and must be learned.

Prosody in production at the onset of word use: A cross-linguistic study

Abstract An investigation of the acoustic correlates of prosody in infant disyllabic vocalizations was undertaken on the basis of data from 10 each of American- and Finnish- and five each of French- and Welsh-learning infants at the onset of word use (10–18 months). The 639 disyllables were analyzed acoustically for duration, intensity and fundamental frequency ( f 0). The infants differed in their production patterns with regard to all three acoustic cues, although they agreed in exhibiting high variability in the production of intensity and f 0. Infants exposed to each of the four languages showed evidence of final syllable lengthening and the production of both first- and second-syllable-stressed or accented disyllables. However, Finnish and Welsh infants produced proportionally more trochaic and iambic patterns, respectively. The use of acoustic prosodic cues at the onset of word use is argued to reflect a combination of biological predispositions and response to prosodic cues that show consistency in the input signal, while a more complete integration of prosody and segmental features seems to require more lexical knowledge or experience.

The development of narrative productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content in four- to eight-year-old Finnish children

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure showed a developmental trend. Concerning consecutive age groups, significant differences were observed between four- and five-year-olds in productivity and event content and between five- and six-year-olds in referential cohesion. Multiple regression analysis showed that the relationship between productivity and event content was important, and especially the number of different word tokens proved to be useful in explaining the event content, whereas the number of communication units did not. This suggests that some productivity measures should be interpreted with caution.

Children with specific language impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in the first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in the third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.

The Phonological Mean Length of Utterance: Methodological Challenges from a Crosslinguistic Perspective.

The present study assesses the phonological development of 17 children acquiring Finnish at the developmental point of 25 words (ages 1; 2-2;0). The analysis is made using the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (PMLU) method (Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002), which focuses on the childrens whole-word productions. Two separate analyses are carried out: the first analysis concentrates on consonants and follows the procedure devised by Ingram and Ingram (2001), and the second analysis also scores the correctness of vowels. The PMLU results of both analyses are found to be much higher than those reported for children acquiring English. The results show the apparent need for more language-specific research in order to develop the PMLU method suitable for various language environments.

Phonological development in children learning Finnish: A review

The language to which children are exposed has been shown to have a direct effect on their early phonological development. Despite a growing body of data from cross-linguistic studies and studies on phonological development in various language environments, English still often serves as a benchmark for comparative studies. This article reviews general trends in phonological development and compares them with the latest studies on children acquiring Finnish. The main goal is to explore the course and timing of the development in children acquiring Finnish by bringing together recent research from phonemic inventories and phonotactics, including word length acquisition. Key developmental steps of phonological development are identified and directions for future research are recommended.

Quantity constraints on the temporal implementation of phrasal prosody in Northern Finnish

This study investigated interactions between vowel quantity and two types of prosodic lengthening (accentual lengthening and the combined effect of accentual and utterance-final lengthening) in disyllabic words in Northern Finnish. Two quantity-related constraints were observed. First, in both types of prosodic lengthening, vowels were lengthened less when they were next to a syllable containing a double vowel than when they were next to a syllable containing a single vowel (a quantity neighbour constraint). Second, a durational ceiling effect was observed for the phonologically single, half-long vowel under the combined effect of accentual and utterance-final lengthening. These findings can be seen to support the view that quantity languages regulate the non-phonemic use of duration because of the high functional load of duration at the phonemic level. Additionally, the combined effect of accentual and utterance-final lengthening appeared to have its own lengthening profile, distinct from the simple sum of the two lengthening effects suggested previously. Implications for speech timing research will be discussed.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters’ social or language status, but not with the raters’ age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

Word length in syllables: evidence from early word production in Finnish

This study examines the phonological form of ten Finnish-speaking childrens productive vocabulary in the period of transition into speech, with primary focus on the number of syllables in a word. The results showed that Finnish children produced relatively few monosyllables and a large number of disyllables in their early words. This seemed to reflect the predominance of disyllabic target words over monosyllabic ones in Finnish. Furthermore, it appeared that the reduction of disyllabic words was very uncommon, whereas polysyllabic words were considerably more often deformed. Finally, the polysyllabic words were quite often truncated in such a way that they fitted a trochaic pattern, which may partly be due to the fact that primary word stress in Finnish falls on the first syllable. Additionally, the segmental content of the target word and the use of a favourite template may have an effect on the selection of syllables. Thus, the present results suggest that the target language affects the syllabicity of childrens early word productions and that differences in the linguistic features of the input may influence the strategies that children use when producing their first words.