by Paola Escudero, escudero@uva.nl. Webpage.

Updated 12/06/07


LOT Summer School 2007 Course
L1, L2, L3 & bilingual sound perception & word recognition

This course is on the acquisition of two language comprehension abilities, i.e. sound perception and word recognition, in normally developing populations, i.e. babies and adults who have no cognitive or development problems. It is a nice continuation for those of you who followed Esther Janse's course (last LOT school, Jan 2007). We will take a look at many learning scenarios, namely infants and children raised in monolingual and bilingual households, adult speakers of one language only (a rare situation nowadays), adults speakers of two languages and of three or more.

The course has both a data oriented and a theoretical components because we will not only discuss behavioural, psycholinguistic and some neourophysiological studies but also look into the existing attempts at modelling (i.e. providing explanations) the results of these studies.

Basic knowledge of phonetics, current phonology (or read the review article assigned as preparatory reading very well) and language acquisition is required.


Background Reading
Day-to-day Programme



Background reading

 The following articles are suggested for background reading prior to the course (all articles are in pdf and downloadable from here). The contents will help understading the empirical and theoretical aspects of the other studies within the course. The first three articles are datat oriented: the first is about L1, the second about L2, and the third about L1, L2 and bilingual sound perception as well as the interralation between sound perception and word recognition. The first paper also introduces a model-like framework for explaining L1 acquisition
The last two articles are about linguistic modelling, the fourth is about how L1 sound perception can be modelled in Optimality Theory and the last article is about how other aspects of L1 phonological acquisition can be modelled in Optimality Theory.

Werker, J.F. & Curtin, S. (2005): PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing. Language Learning and Development, 1(2), 197-234.

Escudero, P. & P. Boersma (2002): The subset problem in L2 perceptual development: Multiple-category assimilation by Dutch learners of Spanish. In Barbora Skarabela, Sarah Fish, and Anna H.-J. Do (eds.). Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 208-219. Cascadilla.

Escudero, P. (2007): Multilingual sound perception and word recognition. Stem, Spraak en Taalpathologie.

Boersma, Escudero & Hayes (2003): Learning abstract phonological from auditory phonetic categories: An integrated model for the acquisition of language-specific sound categories. In Sole, M.J., D. Recansens and J. Romero (eds.) Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences , Barcelona.

Boersma, P. & Levelt, C. (2003): Optimality Theory and phonological acquisition (review article). Annual Review of Language Acquisition 3: 1-50.

Monday

Topic: Sound perception and word recognition in monolingual infants and adults

Required readings before the lecture:

Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831- 843.

Suzanne Curtin, Chris Fennell & Paola Escudero (2007). Infants’ recognition of vowel contrasts in a word learning task. In Caunt-Nulton, Heather, Kulatilake, Samantha, and Woo, I-hao. Proceedings of the 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development, 1, 141-152. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Paola Escudero & Linda Polka (2003): A cross-language study of vowel categorization and vowel acoustics. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences , Barcelona, August 3-9, 2003.

Tuesday
Topic: Modelling how sound perception and word recognition interact.

Required readings before the lecture:

Boersma, Paul (2001). Phonology-semantics interaction in OT, and its acquisition. In Robert Kirchner, Wolf Wikeley & Joe Pater (eds.): Papers in Experimental and Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 6: 24-35. Edmonton: University of Alberta.

Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90, 51-89

Wednesday

Topic: Sound perception and word recognition in bilinguals and L2 learners.

Escudero, P. (under review). Linguistic Perception of "similar" L2 sounds.

Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2004). Lexical competition in non-native spoken- word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 1-25.

Thursday

Topic: Modelling the interaction between sound perception and word recognition in bilinguals and L2 learners.

Weiand, K. (2007). Implementing Escudero's model for the Subset problem. Rutgers Optimality Archive 913.

Friday

Topic: Wrapping up, discussion, applying models to L3 acquisition, training for imporving L2/L3 sound perception and word recognition.