TY - JOUR
T1 - Motor influences on grammar in an emergentist model of phonology
AU - Byun, Tara Mc Allister
AU - Tessier, Anne Michelle
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2019 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - Any account aiming to provide a comprehensive picture of children's acquisition of speech must consider both the development of the phonological grammar and the maturation of the structures and motor skills used to implement the sounds of a language. Much previous literature has been marked by a tendency to draw sharp demarcations between motor and grammatical influences, or to assert that all of child speech can be reduced to one or the other. This paper argues that it is neither necessary nor desirable to segregate speech-motor development from grammatical development when modeling speech acquisition, because they are fundamentally intertwined. The paper focuses on bringing together two literatures that have evolved largely independently. The first explores how speech-motor patterns practiced during babbling come to be disproportionately represented in the lexicon in children's earliest stages of meaningful speech. The second posits that abstract elements of phonology – segments, features, and constraints – can be understood to emerge from generalizations over stored memory traces at a more holistic level. We argue that an emergentist model of phonological learning can be enhanced by incorporating the insight that memory traces of strings that have been heard and produced are encoded more robustly than strings that have only been heard.
AB - Any account aiming to provide a comprehensive picture of children's acquisition of speech must consider both the development of the phonological grammar and the maturation of the structures and motor skills used to implement the sounds of a language. Much previous literature has been marked by a tendency to draw sharp demarcations between motor and grammatical influences, or to assert that all of child speech can be reduced to one or the other. This paper argues that it is neither necessary nor desirable to segregate speech-motor development from grammatical development when modeling speech acquisition, because they are fundamentally intertwined. The paper focuses on bringing together two literatures that have evolved largely independently. The first explores how speech-motor patterns practiced during babbling come to be disproportionately represented in the lexicon in children's earliest stages of meaningful speech. The second posits that abstract elements of phonology – segments, features, and constraints – can be understood to emerge from generalizations over stored memory traces at a more holistic level. We argue that an emergentist model of phonological learning can be enhanced by incorporating the insight that memory traces of strings that have been heard and produced are encoded more robustly than strings that have only been heard.
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U2 - 10.1111/lnc3.12205
DO - 10.1111/lnc3.12205
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84988892806
SN - 1749-818X
VL - 10
SP - 431
EP - 452
JO - Language and Linguistics Compass
JF - Language and Linguistics Compass
IS - 9
ER -