GALA 2009

GALA 2009 Workshop
Sound structures and lexical representations

Organized by: Maria João Freitas.

One of the central research questions in acquisition studies concerns the way in which a child is building his/her lexicon in the course of language acquisition and how much linguistic detail is represented in the entries in this mental lexicon. In this workshop, our aim is to specifically focus on one aspect of lexical representations: their sound structure. Even though the nature of adult phonological representations in the lexicon has been a central issue since the beginning of generative phonology, research on the acquisition of phonology over the last three decades has not systematically addressed the topic. This is mainly due to the fact that most generative approaches of children's phonological development have assumed that children's input structures are adult-like and that the shape of children's outputs are the product of a phonological system under development. However, over the last years, based on evidence from both speech perception and speech production some researchers have argued that early lexical representations might not be adult-like and that the lack of phonological detail may be one of the factors constraining a child's linguistic behaviour. This raises the following questions: How do children acquire a system of phonological contrasts? What is the nature of phonological features that make up children's phonological representations: are they based on articulatory or acoustic features? How do children map auditory information onto their phonological representations? What is the role of adult phonological rules in the acquisition process, and how do children ultimately acquire those rules?

The workshop we are now organizing welcomes studies on both perception and production data, dealing with phonological units and phonological processes in the areas of phonetics, phonology and the interface phonology-morphology, thus contributing to the discussion on the nature of phonological representations in the child's lexicon. Our invited speaker, Paula Fikkert ( Radboud University Nijmegen ) has investigated various aspects of phonology in both child language production and in child language perception. We have asked her to provide an overview of the nature of phonological representations in children's developing lexicons and address some of the questions raised above.

GALA 2009 Workshop
Cross-population Study of Atypical Language Acquisition

Organized by: Phillipe Prévost and Laurie Tuller.

Language development in children with language impairment is slow and protracted.  Acquisition in these cases is atypical in that typical developmental timing is off due to pathology.  Timing of language development is also atypical in the case of childhood acquisition of a second language (L2) after age four (Schwartz 2004).  L2 children resemble children with pathology in that developmental timing is not following a typical course either.  Studies comparing these different situations of atypical language acquisition have increased in recent years (see Levy & Schaeffer, 2003).  Such cross-population study of atypical language acquisition may hold one of the keys to better understanding of fundamental variables involved in language development in children.  Comparison of language impairment in children with autism and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has revealed striking similarities in the particular ways in which both syntax and phonology are impaired (see, for example, Roberts, Rice & Tager-Flusberg, 2004).  Comparison of children with SLI and children learning the same language as a second language has suggested that difficulties found in the context of pathology can also be observed in children without pathology (see, for example, Paradis & Crago, 2000).  The results of these studies call for clarification of the notion of clinical marker, and raise questions about the nature of language impairment/vulnerability.