Conférence de M. Vihman le 26 mai

[AROUI Jean-Louis]

L'UMR 7023 a le plaisir de vous convier, dans le cadre des séances de son 
séminaire,

le lundi 26 mai 2008
10h00-12h00, Université Paris VIII, 2, rue de la liberté, 93200 Saint-Denis 
(métro Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13), bâtiment D, salle D 143,

à une conférence de Marilyn Vihman (University of York)

intitulée

"Templates in phonological development"

Résumé :

The study of child language must ultimately find a way to account for the 
developmental source of linguistic system. In one influential approach to 
this problem Universal Grammar (or UG) is assumed to provide the essential 
knowledge of linguistic structure that serves as the starting point for all 
language acquisition, leading to the basic question, what exactly needs to be 
learned? (Peperkamp, 2003). This must then be followed by the question of the 
nature of the triggering process needed to establish the specifics of a given 
language: How does the child recognize the critical data that will make it 
possible to set the appropriate parameters? For approaches that deny the 
existence of UG the questions are the converse: with what knowledge, if any, 
does the child begin?, followed by the complementary question, how can the 
child gain knowledge of linguistic structure or system? 

In this talk I will begin by reviewing the arguments for ‘whole-word 
phonology’, which I see as characterizing children’s first phonological 
system (based on production data), and I will suggest learning mechanisms 
that might underlie such a system. Secondly, I will report preliminary 
findings from an ongoing study that puts those hypotheses to the test by 
investigating the relationship of phonological advance to lexical and 
grammatical learning in ‘expressive late talkers’ - children whose expressive 
language is 6 or more months behind at age 2.5 years (with normal 
comprehension). Our hypothesis is that the late talkers will fall into two 
groups, identifiable from their word production: (i) children who are slow to 
make a start but who show the same kind of sytematization in their word forms 
as is found in the typically developing children and (ii) children whose word 
production displays little evidence of systematization. The prediction is 
that in one-year follow-up recordings (not yet available for analysis) group 
(i) will have caught up with the typically developing children, showing 
normal linguistic levels for their age as assessed for phonology, 
morphosyntax and lexical diversity (based on spontaneous speech data) as well 
as in formal tests; in contrast, group (ii) will continue to show language 
delay and may be diagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). I 
will report on the procedure that we have developed to quantify and compare 
systematicity – a critical first step in testing our hypothesis. In addition, 
I will indicate the differences we are finding between the typically 
developing children, on the one hand, and the late talkers, on the other, who 
do appear to fall into the two groups that we were expecting to find.
-- 
Jean-Louis AROUI
Université Paris 8
UFR des Sciences du Langage
2, rue de la liberté
93200 Saint-Denis
FRANCE
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20080520/4785947a/attachment.htm>