Tania S Zamuner

University of Ottawa · Department of Linguistics

Adults continually exploit linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming language content. Though this type of anticipatory processing has primarily been studied within languages, the present paper examines whether grammatical gender cues from one language (gendered determiners in French) can trigger anticipatory processing for cross-language targets (gen...

Studies on the role of speech production on learning have found a memory benefit from production labeled the "Production Effect." While research with adults has generally shown a robust memory advantage for produced words, children show more mixed results, and the advantage is affected by age, cognitive, and linguistic factors. With adults, the Pro...

Recent work examining cue integration across levels of linguistic representation has found that listeners can dynamically integrate some of the lower-level and higher-level cues during spoken language comprehension. However, it is still not well understood how the mechanism of cue integration works. This study investigated how adults (n = 52) proce...

Spoken word-recognition is a foundational skill in child language development; the organization and activation of phonological and semantic competitors develops which in turn impacts word recognition. One of the factors impacting spoken word recognition is the ability to resolve lexical competition. The current study first examines how the time-cou...

The visual world paradigm (VWP) can be used to understand the time-course of activation of words and their competitors during spoken word recognition. A target word is presented auditorily (e.g., ‘candy’) while the target word and its competitors are presented visually. Competitors are words that may be activated briefly despite not being the targe...

The production effect is influenced by various factors, including cognitive and linguistic-related variables. Previous studies found that the production effect varies when stimuli have native versus non-native speech sounds, but to date, no studies have investigated whether the effect is also modulated by the frequency of sound patterns within a la...

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explic...

Research has found mixed evidence for the production effect in childhood. Some studies have found a positive effect of production on word recognition and recall, while others have found the reverse. This paper takes a developmental approach to investigate the production effect. Children aged 2–6 years (n = 150) from a predominantly white population...

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on contrasti...

A word is considered concrete when it has available sensory referents and an easily accessible mental image. For example, the word ‘bread’ describes an object which can be directly tasted, smelled and touched. Compared to concrete words, abstract words (e.g., ‘justice’) lack the same quantity and/or types of direct sensory referents. Some researche...

The impact of speech production throughout language development begins at an early age; infant research has suggested that production carries perceptual and saliency influences (Bruderer et al., 2015; Yeung & Werker, 2013), which enables produced words in early toddlerhood to have more developed or integrated lexical representations (Vihman, 2017;...

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extende...

Purpose Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension–expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic neigh...

Children come to understand many words by the end of their first year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked: are phonological neighborhood density (PND), semantic neighborhood density...

Previous work has demonstrated that during spoken word recognition, listeners can use a variety of cues to anticipate an upcoming sound before the sound is encountered. However, this vein of research has largely focused on local phenomena that hold between adjacent sounds. In order to fill this gap, we combine the Visual World Paradigm with an Arti...

The Publisher regrets that, due to a typesetting mistake, it has now become necessary to make the following corrections: All phonetic transcriptions (between square brackets and slashes) should be corrected and displayed as follows, in the same font.

The speech signal is inherently rich, and this reflects complexities of speech articulation. During spoken-word recognition, listeners must process time-dependent perceptual cues, and the role that these cues play varies depending on the phonological status of the sounds across languages. For example, Canadian French has both phonologically nasal v...

As children learn language, they spontaneously imitate the speech of those around them. This article investigates the new words that five children imitated between 1 and 2 years of age. Children were more likely to imitate new words as they aged and as their productive language developed. After controlling for age, children also were more likely to...

This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children's recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a bl...

Research on human development can be challenging for many reasons, one of which is high attrition rates for infants and children. To address the issues of attention and engagement, we examined whether gamification of an experimental methodology improved preschoolers’ participation on a task. The Primed Picture-Naming Task (PPNT) has been widely use...

The dichotomy of contrastive and allophonic phonological relationships has a long-standing tradition in phonology, but there is growing research that points to phonological relationships that fall between contrastive and allophonic. Measures of lexical distinction (minimal pair counts) and predictability of distribution were applied to Laurentian F...

During spoken word recognition, adults use coarticulation cues to anticipate upcoming phonemes (Dahan et al., 2001; Beddor et al, 2013), but knowledge on how children use such cues is limited. Studies have shown that children are able to perceive coarticulation cues and use them to distinguish between ambiguous syllables (Fowler et al., 1990; McMur...

In our commentary, we discuss two additional points about developmental speech production. First, we suggest that more precision is needed to accurately describe ‘speech production’ processes, and we suggest that hierarchical constructs from the adult literatures on articulatory phonology and speech motor control may be applicable to infants as wel...

To understand speech, listeners need to be able to decode the speech stream into meaningful units. However, coarticulation causes phonemes to differ based on their context. Because coarticulation is an ever-present component of the speech stream, it follows that listeners may exploit this source of information for cues to the identity of the words...

Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned...

Research has shown that young infants use contrasting acoustic information to distinguish conso- nants. This has been used to argue that by 12 months infants have homed in on their native language sound categories. However, this ability seems to be positionally constrained, with contrasts at the beginning of words (onsets) discriminated earlier. Th...

Over the course of the first 2 years of life, infants are learning a great deal about the sound system of their native language. Acquiring the sound system requires the infant to learn about sounds and their distributions, sound combinations, and prosodic information, such as syllables, rhythm, and stress. These aspects of the phonological system a...

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, ; Smith, ). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar word form w...

Phonotactic probabilities and children's speech production have been investigated widely, in both children with typical language development and children with phonological delay. Research has also documented infants' sensitivities to phonotactic probabilities in infant speech perception, using methodologies that measure infants' listening preferenc...

This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtə...

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological developmen...

Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research provides students and researchers interested in language acquisition with comprehensible and practical information on the most frequently used methods in language acquisition research. It includes contributions on first and child/adult second language learners, language-impaired children, and on...

Purpose To examine the role of phonotactic probabilities at the onset of language development, in a new language (Dutch), while controlling for word position. Method Using a nonword imitation task, 64 Dutch-learning children (age 2;2–2;8 [years;months]) were tested on how they imitated segments in low- and high-phonotactic probability environments...

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on children's earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in word-on...

Recent research in language acquisition argues that production plays a unique role in the acquisition of phonological and lexical representations [Fikkert. In press, LabPhonX]. In this research, we investigate the effect of production in early lexical acquisition. Twenty Dutch‐learning children participated in a word‐learning task, where children w...

We consider two theories of laryngeal representation, one using a single feature [voice] generalizing across prevoicing languages and aspiration languages, and the other using multiple features: [voice] for pre-voicing languages and [spread glottis] for aspiration languages. We derive predictions for children's early productions, and test these for...

This article examines the structure and usage of nicknames given to professional hockey and baseball players. Two general types are observed: a phrasal referring expression and a single-word hypocoristic. The phrasal nickname is descriptive but is only used referentially, usually in sports narrative. The hypocoristic is used for both reference and...

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language-specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable- or word-final positi...

Parallels between cross-linguistic and child language data have been used to support a theory of language development in which acquisition is mediated by universal grammar (Universal Grammar Hypothesis—UGH). However, structures that are frequent across languages are also typically the most frequent within a specific language. This confounding of cr...

Fikkert and Levelt (2004) argue that children’s early production preferences give rise to emerging constraints. When the child’s lexicon contains initial labials, a constraint is generated directing labials to word-initial position. The data contain no dorsal-initial words, leading to a constraint against word-initial dorsals. Coronals freely occur...

This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and c...

This book provides an analysis of two theories of language acquisition: the theory that acquisition is primarily mediated by innate properties of language provided by universal grammar, and the opposing theory that language is acquired based on the patterns in the ambient language. A problem not often considered is that these two theories are confo...

Carol Fehringer. A Reference Grammar of Dutch: With exercises and key. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xxiii + 185. US$69.65 (hardcover), $27.95 (softcover). - Volume 47 Issue 1-2 - Tania S. Zamuner

An eminent study in morphological acquisition is Jean Berko's (1958) paper entitled "The child's learning of English morphology". In her study, she examined children's productive knowledge of English allomorphs using a methodology called the Wug Test. Children were tested on their application of plural allomorphs: English words ending in final voic...

In Dutch, word final neutralization of voicing causes an alternation between singulars and plurals: e.g. one [bEt] 'bed' ~ two [bEd´n] 'beds'. Dutch-learning children were tested on their production of /t/ and /d/ in different morphological contexts. Children tended to produce /d/ as [t] in bi-morphemic words (e.g. [bEt´n]), whereas they correctly...