We are happy to announce a talk by Brechtje Post in the Phonology Colloquium.
Room: IG 4.301
Date: May 14th 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Title: Linguistic phonetic biases in first and second language acquisition
Abstract:
In acquiring ambient language, infants have to learn:
– phonetic skills (negotiate universal phonetic constraints in flux)
– language-specific phonological structure
– language-specific linguistic-phonetic ‘devices’ to signal this structure
– the complex mappings between structure and these ‘devices’
– ‘linguistic-phonetic biases’ which specify the mapping between abstract structures and the phonetic forms, or devices, used to implement them
These all shape acquisition pathway individually and cross-linguistically for children and adult learners.
However, these ‘devices’ may be used as a multiple signifier in a particular language, e.g. the role of duration in English where it cues e.g. voice (‘pre-fortis clipping’) as well as vowel quality, but also the marking of prosodic heads and edges.
How do infants and other language learners juggle these when their languages place competing demands on these ‘devices’? And more broadly, what evidence can we find for the influence of linguistic phonetic biases in language-specific developmental paths in the acquisition of speech?
I will explore several examples in which the fine-tuning of the acquisition of the competing demands on such ‘devices’ is key to the signalling of specific phonological features, arguing that a multi-componential approach to speech acquisition can help to unpack the development of dynamically changing language systems within individuals – both in L1 and L2 (see e.g. Payne et al. 2012, Payne 2016, Post and Payne 2018, Post and Jones 2021, Garmann et al. 2020, 2021).