Yvan Rose

Input Elaboration, Head Faithfulness and Evidence for Representation in the Acquisition of Left-edge Clusters in West Germanic

Several recent investigations of the development of left-edge clusters in West Germanic languages have demonstrated that the relative sonority of adjacent consonants plays a key role in children’s reduction patterns (e.g. Fikkert 1994, Gilbers & Den Ouden 1994, Chin 1996, Barlow 1997, Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Gierut 1999, Ohala 1999, Gnanadesikan this volume). These authors have argued that, for a number of children, at the stage in development when only one member of a left-edge cluster is produced, it is the least sonorous segment that survives, regardless of where this segment appears in the target string or the structural position that it occupies (head, dependent, or appendix). To briefly illustrate, while the more sonorous /S/ 2 is lost in favour of the stop in /S/+stop clusters, /S/ is retained in /S/+sonorant clusters; similarly, the least sonorous stop survives in both /S/+stop and stop+sonorant clusters, in spite of the fact that it occurs in different positions in the two strings. To account for reduction patterns such as these, a structural difference between /S/-initial and stop-initial clusters need not be assumed. This would seem to fare well in view of much of the recent constraint-based literature which de-emphasises the role of prosodic constituency in favour of phonetically-based explanations of phonological phenomena (see e.g. Hamilton 1996, Wright 1996, Kochetov 1999, Steriade 1999, Cote 2000). In this paper, we focus on a second set of reduction patterns for left-edge clusters, one which is not addressed in most of the sonority-based literature on cluster reduction in child language (L1): these patterns reveal a preference for structural heads to survive. For example, while the stop is retained in clusters of the shape /S/+stop and stop+sonorant, it is the sonorant that survives in /S/+sonorant clusters. The only sources that we have found where explicit reference is made to the retention of heads are Spencer (1986), who reanalyses Amahl’s data

Uninflected Structure in Familial Language Impairment: Evidence from French

We present the results of 20 French subjects with familial language impairment (FLI) on a linguistic battery task, with an emphasis on verb production. The results show strong qualitative differences between the verb production of FLI subjects and that of controls. Language-specific factors do not seem to determine the production of verbs in French FLI individuals. Rather, verb frequency and the inflectional status (uninflected vs. inflected) of the form seem to be determining factors in correct/incorrect production of a verb in a sentence context. The phonetic structure of French inflection provides additional arguments against the hypothesis of a processing deficit in FLI subjects. French tense morphemes are stressed and salient, and should therefore be produced without problems, according to the processing hypothesis. We found evidence contrary to this postulate. We therefore submit that the morphological deficit hypothesis is supported by the French data.

Phon 1.2: A Computational Basis for Phonological Database Elaboration and Model Testing

This paper discusses a new, open-source software program, called Phon, that is designed for the transcription, coding, and analysis of phonological corpora. Phon provides support for multimedia data linkage, segmentation, multiple-blind transcription, transcription validation, syllabification, alignment of target and actual forms, and data analysis. All of these functions are available through a user-friendly graphical interface. Phon, available on most computer platforms, supports data exchange among researchers with the TalkBank XML document format and the Unicode character set. This program provides the basis for the elaboration of PhonBank, a database project that seeks to broaden the scope of CHILDES into phonological development and disorders.

Internal and external influences on child language productions

Over the past three decades, statistical approaches have been successfully used to explain how young language learners discriminate the sounds of their mother tongue(s), perceive and acquire linguistic categories (e.g. phonemes), and eventually develop their mental lexicon. In brief, input statistics, i.e. the relative frequency of the linguistic units that children are exposed to (e.g. phones, syllable types), appear to provide excellent predictors in the areas of infant speech perception and processing. This research offers useful insight into both the nature of the linguistic input that infants attend to and how they sort out the evidence from that input (see Gerken 2002 for a recent overview). Building on this success, a number of linguists have recently proposed statistical explanations for patterns of phonological productions that were traditionally accounted for through typological universals, representational complexity, grammatical constraints and constraint rankings, or lower-level perceptual and articulatory factors. For example, Levelt, Schiller and Levelt (1999/2000) have proposed, based on longitudinal data on the acquisition of Dutch, that the order of acquisition of syllable types (e.g. CV, CVC, CCV) can be predicted through the relative frequency of occurrence of these syllable types in the ambient language. Following a similar approach, Demuth and Johnson (2003) have proposed that a pattern of syllable truncation resulting in CV forms attested in a learner of French was triggered by the high frequency of the CV syllable type in this language. However, important questions need to be addressed before one can conclude that statistical approaches, or any mono-dimensional approach based on a single source of explanation, truly offer strong predictions for developmental production patterns. For example, one must wonder whether input statistics, which are mediated through the perceptual system and computed at the cognitive level, can have such an impact on production, given that production, itself influenced by the nature of phonological representations,

Fostering human rights through TalkBank

Abstract In accord with articles 19 and 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people with speech and language disorders have the right to receive maximal benefit from academic research on speech and language acquisition and disorders. To evaluate the diverse nature of speech and language disorders, this research must have access to large datasets, as well as to refined tools for the systematic analysis of these datasets. The TalkBank system addresses this need by providing researchers with thousands of hours of open-access database archives of digital audio, video and transcript files documenting typical and disordered language use in dozens of languages and cultures. In this paper, we review the TalkBank system, with an emphasis on the AphasiaBank, PhonBank and FluencyBank databases. We describe how specialised assessment tools can be used to study issues in speech and language acquisition and disorders recorded within these databases. We then provide illustrations of how assessments support the needs of researchers, clinicians, developers, and educators, whose combined work contributes solutions for people with speech, language and language learning disorders worldwide.

Using PhonBank and Phon in studies of phonological development and disorders.

Abstract The goal of this paper is to present an overview of new tools that can be used to further our understanding of phonological development and disorders. We begin with a summary of the field of child phonology with a focus on databases and methods of analysis and then move to a description of PhonBank, a shared database for the study of phonology, and Phon, a specialised software system capable of performing various types of phonological analyses based on both phonetic transcriptions and acoustic analyses of speech productions. We provide a detailed example of using PhonBank and Phon to examine the use of velar fronting using longitudinal data from one child with typical development and three children with phonological disorder. We conclude with an emphasis on data sharing and its central relevance to further advances in our field.

Analyzing clinical phonological data using Phon

In this article, we describe how Phon, an open-source software program for the transcription and analysis of phonological data, can be applied to facilitate clinical phonological analyses. We begin with a summary of the types of analyses that are frequently used in the assessment and management of speech sound disorders. We then discuss challenges inherent to the transcription and analysis of clinical phonological data. For each challenge, we discuss solutions currently available within Phon and offer an outlook on future methodological and technical developments in the area of clinical phonology. This article includes a step-by-step introduction to Phon suitable for readers who lack previous experience with the software. We conclude with a discussion of data sharing and its vital role in advancing research and intervention practices in the area of speech development and disorders.

Phon: A Computational Basis for Phonological Database Building and Model Testing

This paper describes Phon, an open-source software program for the transcription, coding, and analysis of phonetically-transcribed speech corpora. Phon provides support for multimedia data linkage, utterance segmentation, multiple-blind transcription, transcription validation, syllabification, and alignment of target and actual forms. All functions are available through a user-friendly graphical interface. This program provides the basis for the building of PhonBank, a database project that seeks to broaden the scope of CHILDES into phonological development and disorders.