Phonetics and Phonology

Cognition and Development – Child Language Acquisition

In this course, Professor Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) explores childhood language acquisition. In the first lecture, we explore how children learn to distinguish the basic sounds (phonemes) that make up their mother tongue. In the second lecture, we think about how children learn new words. In the third lecture, we explore how children learn the rules of morphology and how we can test for that understanding. Next, we think about how children learn the rules of syntax. In the fifth and final lecture, we review a general timeline of child language acquisition from the middle of the second trimester to five years old.

Phonetics and Phonology

In this lecture, we think about how children learn to recognise the basic sounds that make up their mother tongue, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent to which any given language will make use of the complete set of phonemes available; (ii) the extent to which different languages distinguish phonemes in different ways; (iii) the traditional view of child language acquisition, articulated by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s; (iv) the three ‘ingredients’ of a consonant sound – the manner of articulation, the place of articulation, and the phonation – and children’s ability to distinguish phonemes where just one ingredient is different, e.g. /d/ and /t/; and (v) criticisms of the traditional view of child language acquisition; and (vi) the development of new theories of child language acquisition.