Browsing by Subject "Acquisition"
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Item The acquisition of consonant feature sequences: Harmony, metathesis and deletion patterns in phonological development.(2010-12) Gerlach, Sharon RuthThis dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in coat [kok]; long-distance metathesis as in cup [pak]; and initial consonant deletion as in fish [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for child-specific constraints. Initial consonant deletion in particular is a little-understood phenomenon thought to be idiosyncratic. However, my survey of initial consonant deletion as reported in eight languages reveals systematic deletion patterns affecting continuants and sequences of different consonants. I argue that all of these child-specific processes are tied to the acquisition of consonant sequences. In order to understand the role of these processes in phonological development, I examine consonant acquisition data from a diary study of Grace, an English-acquiring child. I adopt the Bernhardt and Stemberger (1998) variant of Optimality Theory for the analysis since their view of default underspecification, sequences of features, and feature-based approach to sonority permit a unified analysis of harmony, metathesis and initial consonant deletion that explains Grace's trajectory of acquisition as well as the frequency of certain patterns across children. I show that independently motivated constraints governing feature sequences, onset sonority preferences, initial velars, and the tendency to anticipate features within a prosodic domain explain all of these processes, as well as Grace's onset cluster reduction patterns (e.g. snake [seɪk]) and gradual acquisition of different cluster types. Children must learn to produce consonant feature sequences within a word before producing sequences within an onset. Child-specific processes are eliminated as children acquire the speech planning skills necessary to express the contrasts of a mature language, though the constraints remain active in adult phonology. The longitudinal data provide evidence for both constraint demotion and promotion in learning, as well as distinct roles for two types of faithfulness constraints. One mandates the preservation of non-default features that are specified in the underlying representation, while the other evaluates identity of a correspondent segment to any non-default feature associated with a segment. This distinction permits the derivation of initial consonant deletion as a response to positional constraints on features or feature sequences.Item Development of scalar implicatures and the indefinite article.(2012-01) Johnson, Kaitlin RosePrevious research in pragmatic development suggests that children as old as ten often fail to make pragmatic inferences associated with quantifiers like some and modal verbs like might; instead they initially interpret these forms in terms of their logical meanings (i.e. some is compatible with all) (Chierchia et al., 2001; Noveck, 2001). This dissertation examines children's acquisition of pragmatic inferences associated with the definite and indefinite articles the and a (Gundel et al., 1993). In a series of three experiments, pragmatic comprehension of these forms is assessed in children and adults through two tasks: an evaluation-based comprehension task similar to tasks used by previous researchers (Puppet Task) as well as an action-based task (Action Task). The results of Experiment 1 indicate that, contrary to previous research with other scalar terms, by age 7 children overwhelmingly prefer the pragmatic interpretation of a. Experiment 1 also revealed that some 5-year-olds show non-adult-like behavior with respect to the definite article the--selecting a not-previously-mentioned object upon hearing the and accepting the puppet's actions when he did the same. Experiment 2 tests, and ultimately rejects, the hypothesis that the 5-year-olds' behavior in response to the in the previous experiment was due to processing difficulties as the result of their having a distributed attention. Experiment 3 attempts to arbitrate between two other explanations for the 5-year-olds' behavior in response to the; young children are either 1) less sensitive than adults and older children to the Relevance-based pragmatic inferences sometimes associated with the or 2) prone to favor new objects (in the Action Task) and agreeing with the puppet (in the Puppet Task) as opposed to attending to the linguistic input in each trial. The results of the Action Task in Experiment 3 lend support to the latter hypothesis; the results of the Puppet Task, however, support the former, suggesting that the Puppet Task was problematic and potentially calling into question some findings from previous research using evaluation-based tasks as a means of evaluating comprehension.Item Does age of language acquisition affect the relation between American sign language and mental rotation?(2009-10) Martin, Amber J.Past research has shown a relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and mental rotation. The goal of the current study was to examine factors related to American Sign Language use that contribute to mental rotation skills. In particular, the factors examined were age of acquisition of ASL, hearing status, gender, spatial language comprehension, spatial language production and amount of use of ASL. Many studies have examined the role of language on cognition, but few have examined which aspects of language knowledge (comprehension or production) contribute to those effects. Further, this study examines the role of age of acquisition of ASL on mental rotation. Participants were adults who had learned ASL at different ages across development. Participants completed a spatial language production task, spatial language comprehension task and a computerized-nonlinguistic mental rotation task that recorded participants' accuracy and reaction times. Results showed that native male signers were significantly faster on mental rotation compared to other groups based on the slope of change across degrees of rotation. Further, male native signers were also slightly more likely to interpret spatial relations in the comprehension task by rotating the signer's description. There were no overall differences between the age of acquisition groups in mental rotation. Men and women did not differ overall in mental rotation nor did hearing and Deaf participants. These results indicate that age of acquisition of ASL after infancy does not affect mental rotation. Implications are discussed for age of acquisition effects on language-cognition relations, for the effects of practice on male native signers' speed of mental rotation, and implications for findings on the language tasks. Further research should examine the effects of age of acquisition of a first language on general speed of processing.