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Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words
Author(s) -
Curtin Suzanne,
Zamuner Tania S.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
wiley interdisciplinary reviews: cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.526
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1939-5086
pISSN - 1939-5078
DOI - 10.1002/wcs.1307
Subject(s) - phonology , lexicon , linguistics , phonological development , context (archaeology) , focus (optics) , sound (geography) , phonetics , sound change , perception , sound system , stress (linguistics) , language development , language acquisition , phonological rule , psychology , computer science , history , philosophy , physics , archaeology , neuroscience , acoustics , optics , geomorphology , geology
Over the course of the first 2 years of life, infants are learning a great deal about the sound system of their native language. Acquiring the sound system requires the infant to learn about sounds and their distributions, sound combinations, and prosodic information, such as syllables, rhythm, and stress. These aspects of the phonological system are being learned simultaneously as the infant experiences the language around him or her. What binds all of the phonological units is the context in which they occur, namely, words. In this review, we explore the development of phonetics and phonology by showcasing the interactive nature of the developing lexicon and sound system with a focus on perception. We first review seminal research in the foundations of phonological development. We then discuss early word recognition and learning followed by a discussion of phonological and lexical representations. We conclude by discussing the interactive nature of lexical and phonological representations and highlight some further directions for exploring the developing sound system. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:589–602. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1307 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Language