Lecture | SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
The role of linguistic phonetic biases in children’s speech development
- Date
- Wednesday 16 September 2026
- Time
- Serie
- SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.16
Abstract
While acquiring their ambient language(s), infants have to learn, among many other challenges, to integrate phonology and phonetics. This involves the development of phonetic skills, the acquisition of language-specific phonological structure, what we call the ‘linguistic-phonetic devices’ their language uses to signal phonological structure, and the complex mappings between them. These all shape the acquisition pathway for children individually and cross-linguistically.
However, ‘linguistic-phonetic devices’ are often used as a multiple signifier in a particular language. For instance, vowel duration in English cues the voicing of a following stop (e.g. [bit] beet vs. [bi:d] bead; referred to as pre-fortis clipping), but also marks prosodic heads and edges (e.g. lengthening of vowels in stressed syllables).
How do infants juggle the competing demands on phonetic devices while they are trying to figure out how their ambient language(s) signal phonological structure? Also, more broadly, the question arises to what extend the influence of these linguistic-phonetic biases determine language-specific developmental paths.
I will present a number of studies which examine the mapping between abstract structure and phonetic form in mono- and bilingual children focussing on examples where the fine-tuning of the acquisition of the competing demands is crucial to signalling language-specific phonological contrasts, arguing that a unified, multi-componential approach is best suited to account for the data.