Phonology and infants' perceptual abilities: asking the right questions
نویسندگان
چکیده
A good deal of painstaking empirical research is detailed in the literature on language acquisition in the first year of life. The majority of it, for obvious reasons, focuses on the infant's perceptual abilities rather than on production, and reveals what is perhaps an initially surprising sophistication in a young child's expertise at discerning contrasts in the acoustic signal which coincide exactly with those used in adult language. In this discussion we will survey some findings relating to children of around six to eight months, with the principal aim of relating these findings to general phonological theory, and show that the examination of this relationship inspires a direction for future research in infant perception. It is an important factor in any account of acquisition that it takes its place within a general theory, though this relationship seems not to be a primary focus of much of the literature we shall be drawing on: it is perhaps worth mentioning, as Menn has done previously (Menn 1980), that Roman Jacobson, whose work advanced many notions that have been drawn upon in modern phonological theory, regarded his highly influential ideas on acquisition as essentially a demonstration of the power of his general theory. We begin with a brief outline of the phonological theory we are adopting. Then follows some exemplification of the problems arising from the lack of integration of these phonological notions into acquisitional research, with a couple of theoretical proposals which could potentially clarify things, and finally we discuss the broad shape of a research program which seems to emerge spontaneously from these considerations, and propose the first step in that program.
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