Language production
Research in this area at the University of York includes topics such as the relationship between babies’ babble and their first words, the development of oral fluency in a second language, phonetic variation within and across speakers.
Project spotlights
Researchers: Catherine Laing
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Infants’ earliest words are structurally simple and phonologically similar. For example, data from a bilingual (English-Spanish) child’s early acquisition (Deuchar & Quay, 2000) shows that many words are phonologically identical: car, clock, casa ‘house’ and cat are all produced as /ka/, and papa ‘daddy’, pájaro ‘bird’ and panda as /pa/. This suggests systematicity in the transition from babble to words.
This project, provides evidence to show that phonological systematicity is a key factor in the way that infants acquire and produce their early words. That is, the developing lexicon contains words that are phonologically similar to one another, and infants tend to produce these words in phonologically-similar ways. I use phonological network analysis to show this, comparing words in nine children’s early vocabularies up until age two years and six months with randomly-generated phonological networks.
Researcher: Eleanor Chodroff
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Variation across talkers in the acoustic-phonetic realisation of speech sounds is a pervasive property of spoken language.
The present study provides evidence that variation across talkers in the realisation of American English stop consonants is highly structured.
Our findings support a uniformity constraint on the talker-specific realisation of a phonetic property, such as glottal spreading, that is shared by multiple speech sounds. As uniformity implies mutual predictability, the findings also shed light on listeners' ability to generalize knowledge of a novel talker from one stop consonant to another. Structured variation of the kind investigated here indicates a relatively low-dimensional encoding of talker-specific phonetic realisation in both speech production and speech perception.
More projects
- Language production and cognitive ageing: Angela de Bruin, Naveen Hanif (PhD student, Psychology)
- Bilingual language switching: Angela de Bruin (Psychology)
- The production of English speech rhythm by L2 Saudi learners: Ghazi Algethami (Taif University, Saudi Arabia), Sam Hellmuth (Language and Linguistic Science)
- Sentence production (from event aprehension to sentence planning within and across languages) (Silvia Gennari, Psychology)
- Cognitive neuroscience of language production (Silvia Gennari, Psychology)