Speaker: Mitshiko Ota (Edinburgh) Title: Children’s word production in Japanese and Mandarin: Crosslinguistic implications for early phonological development

Abstract:

Between the age of 1 and 2 years, children are known to produce wordforms that systematically differ from their adult targets. The sources of these discrepancies have been the subject of intense debate within the field of early language development, but much of the theoretical discussion have been based on data from English and other typologically similar languages. In this talk I present some analyses of children’s word production in Japanese and Mandarin alongside that in English, French and Finnish. Patterns in Japanese and Mandarin differed not only from the other languages but also between themselves in terms of consonant harmony, reduplication, and realizations of dissimilar consonants within a word. These crosslinguistic differences persisted even when the analysis was limited to target words with similar phonological structures. The results show that children’s response to producing challenging target words is not simply a product of immature articulation but reflective of the overall phonological characteristics of the language, suggesting that representational factors – how words are phonologically encoded by the learner –play an important role in shaping early word production.

[This work has been carried out in collaboration with Marylin Vihman, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Shanshan Lou and Rui Qi Choo.]
 

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