About the lecture

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.

About the lecturer

Professor Ben Ambridge is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on children's first language acquisition, mostly using judgment and production methodologies. He is particularly interested in children's errors involving question formation (e.g., *What he doesn't like?) and verb argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *The joked giggled him; *I falled over). One of Professor Ambridge’s recent publications is ‘Syntactic representations contain semantic information: Evidence from Balinese passives’ (2022), and he is also the author of the popular science book Psy-Q, Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee? (2014).