Description
- Abstract:
- The goal of this thesis is to investigate the question of developmental continuity in language acquisition. In particular, it aims to address whether representations of native speech categories are continuous between infants’ early speech perception, infants’ early lexical representations and adults’ mature lexical representations. This question is investigated from two perspectives in the current thesis: a) continuity between infants’ speech perception and infants’ early lexical representations and b) continuity between infancy to adulthood in the architecture of distinctive feature representations in speech and the lexicon. By the end of the first year of life, infants have already acquired a majority of their native speech categories. However, existing theories that differentiate between phonetic representations and phonological representations consider speech category learning a disconnected process from lexical representations. According to this view, while infants can successfully differentiate /b/ and /d/ for example, in a speech perception task, they would not be able to do so in word recognition tasks until they know that /duck/ and /buck/ refer to two different animals. In this way, infants’ early lexical representations should not be as detailed as adults’ mature lexical representations until infants have a large vocabulary size. Such considerations thus predict that infants’ early lexical representations should be less specified in terms of distinctive features than mature lexical representations. Using psycholinguistic experiments and computational modeling, this thesis has challenged hypotheses of developmental discontinuity. The results indicate that infants’ early lexical representations include very detailed and even adult-like information in terms of distinctive features, suggesting substantial developmental continuity between early and mature lexical representations. Moreover, experimental results have indicated that developmental continuity exists both in the amount and the nature of feature specifications in infants’ and adults’ lexicon. Finally, the computational model suggests that from infancy to adulthood, the architecture of distinctive feature representations is also continuous in speech perception.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Ren, Jie,
"From Features to Words: A Study of Developmental Continuity"
(2016).
Cognitive Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0XP73BQ
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Cognitive Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive Sciences department....